


Sell Out Girl

by scarredsodeep



Series: Girl Out Boy [4]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Bisexuality, Bisexuals Exist, Canon Compliant, Exes, F/F, Fall Out Girl, Fame, Femslash, Folie à Deux (Fall Out Boy), Gen, Genderbending, Genderflop, Girl!Patrick Stump - Freeform, Infinity On High (Album), Lesbian Character, Marriage, Music, Nonbinary Character, Pre-Hiatus (Fall Out Boy), Pregnancy, Tales from 2008, Touring, Trans Issues, girl out boy, girl!Pete Wentz - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-07-04 23:43:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 70,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15851853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: We last saw the Girl Out Boys poised on the cusp of the rest of the lives, first record deals and first loves and first times and first homes. Now it’s 2008, the gang’s touring in support of Infinity On High, and things aren’t as we left them...I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free, and laughing at injuries





	1. if i look back i'm lost

**Author's Note:**

> It has been one year since I started posting Girl Out Boy. You guys have made it the most nourishing year of my life. I haven’t stopped receiving love and amazing fanworks for this fic this entire year (check the [Girl Out Boy tag](%E2%80%9Dwww.shark-myths.tumblr.com/tagged/girl_out_boy) on my blog) and honestly, I am humbled and changed and illuminated and uplifted by each of you. Girlfic is a way of cleaning my wounds and letting myself heal, and I hope it is like that for you too. I love you, whether we know each other or not. Thank you, always, for reading. This is for me and for you and for us. I will die for any girl anywhere at any time, and until then, find me here, writing.
> 
> Updates weekly on Fridays.
> 
> (P.S. [Of course there’s a playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4), did you think I could write a fic without one? Let me know what songs make you think of this fic and I’ll add them!)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which girls have the most fun taking their clothes off, Jo commands a girl army, and no one knows quite where they belong.

 

Onstage, the eyes of the wolves upon her, she steps into the glass box. It is Snow White’s casket: a pretty, transparent thin kind of thing, a thing that only breaks in one way (painful), a thing that muffles the screams of whoever’s suffocating lovely inside of it. She can do whatever she wants in there, as long as she does it with a diamond-shine. She can decay.

Pete Wentz, fairytale princess, pulls off her tight black shirt without ceremony or suspense. They’ve all already seen it: what’s the point of a striptease? The crowd chokes on their own screams as she goes for her belt. She undoes her jeans flat-eyed and empty, the face they came here to see, and doesn’t so much trust the cue will come on time as not give a fuck whether it does. She hooks her thumbs under her waistband and tugs downward, revealing broad, firm honeyed thighs, at the same moment smoke gushes into the small glass box, the capsule that is supposed to contain her.

The floor opens up and she struggles the rest of the way out of her skinny jeans as the platform lowers her under the stage, smoke furling down around her. She feels like a rocket launch in reverse, descending away from light and fire into underground dimness, peals of smoke unwinding as she sinks. All the tech guys and crew and theater staff down here, they get the full show: Pete Wentz in snug boy briefs, her ass cheeks perfect half-moons anyone is close enough, now, to cup in their hands. She unhooks her bra lazy, one-handed, and doesn’t pay attention to where she drops it. Dirty, friend and tour manager, stands by with his eyes semi-averted and her costume change in hand. She shrugs into it and stares challengingly in the eyes of anyone who might try to get a look at her tits. Her stare says, _go ahead and look. I fucking dare you._

Her stare says, Pete Wentz in 2008 is not the same woman she was in 2003. Isn’t the girl she was five years ago. Is someone, something, else now.

The comfort of jeans and tee and Clandestine hoodie discarded, Pete turns around so Dirty can run the zipper up her spine. Now she’s in pleather pants and a rose gold latex top, like a Barbie who got dressed in a sex dungeon. She blots sweat off her cheeks and smears on thicker eyeliner smoke below her eyes. She swats away the stylist who’s always trying to tame her hair, like she doesn’t abuse it enough with the flat iron and the relaxers as it is. She puts in big spiked hoop earrings, steps back into her chunky black Vans, and she’s ready to retake the stage. It’s that easy to slip skins, to _change_. She feels smaller, not stronger. She shapeshifts in reverse.

It’s all a big motherfucking costume. The label _insisted_ on costumes. They had these pictures of the Spice Girls, of Beyoncé stadium shows, of Christina Aguilera. They had these pictures of X-Men reboot leather bodysuits, basically, with spiky heels and stick-on body jewels and bikini-cut leotards with knee-high boots, hip cut-outs, plunging spangled cleavage. Pat looked nauseous just from proximity to the pictures; Andy’s fingernails bit into their knees under the table.

Jo said, “You’re joking.”

“It’s harder for female artists to draw a venue-filling crowd, we’ve been over this,” John Janick said. “We all knew what we’d be up against with this tour.”

Pat stared at him in open disgust. “Yeah, but we didn’t realize we’d be up against _our own label_.”

“If you’d consider co-headlining, or adding some men to your roster of openers…” said Bob McLynn.

“Or dressing like strippers?” interrupted Jo.

“Tickets will sell much better if you wear costumes,” said John. It had been said before. It had been said so many times that suddenly, for Pete, it didn’t matter.

Her face flushing hot, Pete snapped, “We’re not wearing this shit. You’re not putting my friends in—in Catwoman cosplay. This isn’t a Britney Spears show!”

And one of the label executives muttered, “No, Britney shows sell out.”

As if Pete needed the reminder that their label was desperate for them to do exactly what their fans were already so quick to accuse them of: sell out.

“The front-end cost of arranging a tour of this scale is simply staggering. We need some way to guarantee the tour will be profitable,” Bob started in his reasonable voice. “It’s meant to support a critically acclaimed but underselling album, it’ll be the winter circuit so you’re up against the weather, you’re trying to book big venues, and you’ve got a lot of competition. And your summer festival tour, well… let me just say the label was underwhelmed by the numbers. I don’t want to scare you, girls, but the stakes here are serious. If Island’s going to fund future tours, let alone another record, you’re going to have to show them you can sell yourselves.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” Pat asked.

Apparently they didn’t. John jumped in, “And advertising is gonna be a problem. You know your media blackout on every writer and photographer who isn’t a woman hasn’t made it easy for us to get your music the audience it deserves—”

“It’s not like the lived circumstances that led to the media blackout were easy either,” Andy muttered to the tabletop. Jo grabbed their shoulder and squeezed.

“What if I take my clothes off onstage?” Pete said. The words were out of her mouth before she’d really considered the execution of the idea. It was just, since the photo leak, she had no illusions about the ways in which she was considered valuable. She was pretty sure that Pete Wentz infamously stripping onstage would sell tickets. She had some of the most-viewed genitals of anyone on the entire internet. She didn’t _want_ to do it, just knew she could without it hurting her. Whereas Pat and Andy and Jo forced onstage in leather catsuits? That would hurt all of them.

“What if I take my clothes off onstage, and no one else has to wear any weird costumes?” Pete stood at the boardroom table and began unbuttoning her flannel shirt, starting at the navel and working up. The suits gaped at her, like they had read about her outrageous behavior in a hundred leaked newspaper exposés but never expected to actually have to deal with it. Pete had the advantage, here: they were fearful of her baring her body, whereas she had already learned (again and again and again, ever since she was a little girl) that her body didn’t mean much. That its value was in its consumption, in its capacity for violence. She could hurt them, shock them, shake them with her nakedness. There wasn’t a damn thing they, or anyone else, could do to her with it. Her body cloned and saved deep in the bellies of countless hard drives across the nation: everything had already been done.

John croaked, “Petra, please! That’s enough.”

Pete’s hands hesitated at the button between her tits. She longed to pop it, to make them stare at her raggedy, unsexy bra, to consider what it meant about any of them that their eyes lingered on the tattooed thorns that dipped into her cleavage, that stripped and insignificant in their halls of power, her body still commanded them. “It’s a good show, is all I’m saying,” she said, her hands still hovering. “Britney in see-through bodysuits, Pete Wentz in her fucking undies, just like the dirty pictures everyone’s pretending like they haven’t seen. It will titillate. Don’t you think?”

Jo leaned forward over the table, shoving a thick curl out of her eyes. “Alternately,” she said, “we could do some cool shit with pyrotechnics.”

So that’s what got her here: wreathed in smoke and flame, stripped and then redressed in leather, preparing to jump out of the stage for the second part of their set. It is the biggest tour Fall Out Boy has ever done: 8 weeks, 44 shows, 44 cities. Corporate sponsorship, three supporting acts. Venues that will accommodate anywhere between 3-10,000. It’s hard for a girl to get that kind of attention, even with chart-topping radio singles and records going platinum. Some things are worth taking your clothes off for.

The musical cue reverberates through the stage above. Pete tugs her tighter-than-skin latex hem, wishing she could hold her bass between her and those who would consume her. She’ll be back behind the music soon. Dirty gives the signal, the stage opens above her head, and Pete’s platform launches her hurtling back into view. She jumps at the exact right moment, appearing to burst out of the stage like she’s explosive, like she’s free.

Pat’s up here in a hat, a blazer, respectable black jeans. No cleavage, no latex, no fucking body glitter. She smiles at Pete, her mouth so perfect behind the microphone, and Jo tosses Pete her bass in a fluid, practiced move. Pete grabs it out of the air, instinctively tuned to the heartbeat-bass of Andy’s rhythm, in sync with her friends even when the rest of her life feels like it’s falling apart.

But she’ll deal with that when the set ends. For now, all she needs to do is be with her friends. All she needs to do is play.

*

“Tour buses are supposed to be so glamorous,” Pat complains, plopping herself onto the couch between Cassadee Pope, the Hey Monday frontwoman who covets Pete’s nail polish collection, and Jo. Currently, Cassadee is painting her talons with blue glitter shellac and Jo is pruning ruthlessly through Pete’s makeup bag, reappropriating her stolen cosmetics. Pat peels off her sneakers with exaggerated moaning. Her feet fucking hurt. They’re only two weeks into this tour—and she’s only 24 years old—but goddamn, her body is already falling apart.

“We’ve never had a bus before,” Cassadee volunteers. The three girl bands they’re touring with—all three of which are on Pete’s label, part of her passion project for uplifting girls and amplifying their voices—are much smaller than Fall Out Boy has become.

“We lived out of Jo’s van for half a decade,” Andy says, pulling their headphones down around their neck at the little dinette table where they’re seated. “This bus is a palace.”

Even Pat’s socks are sweaty. The smell that’s about to happen is not great, and none of the girls crammed into the front lounge are going to thank her for it. She digs into the bottom of her own foot with her thumbs, something Pete would do for her if Pete was here. Pete’s been sleeping on one of the other buses with Willow Beckett, Gabby Saporta, and the other girls, even though all her stuff is here. Pat doesn’t feel any sort of way about it, except that as a former soccer player, Pete gives better foot, ankle, and calf massages than anyone Pat has ever met.

“This mascara is also mine,” Jo mutters, pulling yet another tube out of Pete’s tangle of beauty products. “Living with a bunch of fuckin’ thieves.”

There’s a crash, after a show. Even their best shows, their biggest. For Pat it is especially uncomfortable, and she’d like to hide in the back lounge, the space they’ve converted to act as a recording studio where she can work on the tracks she’s producing and lay down new demos for their next album. But this is their first headline tour since the break-up, and Pat wants everyone to see how cool and normal she is about the situation. Pat wants everyone to see she’s not going to be awkward or hide. Okay, Pat mostly wants Pete to see this, but Pete’s on some other bus, isn’t she? So showing her other friends will have to do. She may want to crawl into solitude and obsess over every mistake she made onstage, every transition that didn’t go smoothly enough, every technical and lighting hiccup, every moment she and Pete almost-but-did-not touch: but instead she’ll rub her own smelly feet right here in the front lounge.

The nice thing about shows this huge are all the lights. They blind her, usually: spotlights in her eyes, the crowd just a dark, screaming mass when the house lights are down. She’s not comfortable up there, exactly—will never be comfortable with all those eyes on her—but it’s easier than the small, smoky venues where she had no choice but to make eye contact with individual fans or daylight summer stages, where she can see lips moving around words Pete wrote, the crowd knowing their songs better than Pat ever seems to. She’s bolder now than she was when they started. She had a crash course in fronting the band in 2005, when Fall Out Boy toured Europe for the first time and Pete wasn’t with her. Pete was in the hospital and the rest of them had to take the stage without Pete’s voice, without Pete’s luck. At first it was like playing without a heart, all of them shy and unsure of how to address the crowd. Then they got used to it.

People can get used to anything, that’s what Pat Stump has learned. People can learn to get on stage next to the ex-love of their life and sing expired love songs about themselves and look so much like they don’t feel a thing that there’s no difference. People can rub their own tired feet without complaint (well, with only minor complaint), people can take a stretchmark-lined path to and through their own bodies, people can find a way to carry on in the face of incomprehensible loss. People can go to voice lessons, learn some tricks, get up in front of audiences that number in the thousands and sing trills and frills they used to be too embarrassed to practice in their own shower. People can meet a cute girl in another band, take her on tour, and start sharing a bunk on the bus, muffling each other’s giggles and moans with hands and mouths, biting imprints into each other’s fists, coming not-so-quietly and not-so-secretly on the other side of the wall from where Pete Wentz is supposed to, but does not, sleep.

People—girls—can do anything.

In a strange way, the extra weight helps. Pat’s never been thin, but lately she’s been tipping past the ‘cute and chubby’ point to something thicker and richer, growing into a body that feels butter-lush and profane. She’s becoming something like _voluptuous_ , tits that enter the room well before the rest of her, thick thighs that make pleasing handfuls, the soft hang of a heavy belly, the gratuitous rounds of her milk-pale ass. It doesn’t make her any less self-conscious, but Pat is finding the weight makes her feels sensual and contained in her own skin in a way that comforts. She’s not a woman who will blow away, or get bowled over; she is solid, corporeal. She shows up in mirrors and on film. She leaves an imprint when she slips between the sheets.

There’s a security, in feeling real. Feeling seen.

And then there’s Vicky. It’s harder to hate her body, heartbreak bloat and pre-existing flaws, when a girl like Victoria Asher likes it so very much.

“I’d light myself on fire if we used fire like that in our act,” Cassadee is saying, surveying her nails and cleaning up smudges.

“A Josephine Trohman who shall remain nameless caught herself on fire on three separate occasions during rehearsal,” Andy volunteers, a smile curling their lips.

“One of those times was Pete’s fault,” Jo immediately protests. She stands, shoves a handful of righteously reappropriated wands and tubes into her hoodie pocket, and scowls at them all like an ill-tempered mother kangaroo. “One and a half.”

“Let’s work on some songs tonight,” Pat suggests. The whole Pete-and-Pat thing has been like a runaway train the last two records; she’s trying to really consciously go out of her way to involve Jo this time. The main problem is that she’s having trouble convincing anyone to touch an instrument when they’re burned out from a show, and Pat’s physically incapable of getting up early enough to work on anything before they play. It’s not like they’re really getting any days off, either. But Island wants the new record as soon as possible, _while girl bands are still relevant_. Everyone knows women age faster than men.

Jo sticks her bottom lip out, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’m tired and crabby. I don’t want to stare at my fretboard for an hour while you fuck around with GarageBand and pretend that that’s songwriting.”

Pat is affronted for 2.6 seconds, and then Victoria emerges from the back of the bus, sparkling with water droplets and wearing only a towel. Her long black hair is twisted into a wet rope that drips down her back, and even from this distance Pat can see the shape of Vicky’s nipples through the towel. That’s pretty much all Pat’s thinking about from then on out.

“Do you want to work on that Cobra track with me, Patty?” Victoria asks, dripping. Her bangs, wet, hang in her eyes, ringed in a fetching smear of leftover mascara. She’s all pale, except for where she’s pink: there’s not a tattoo or stray scar on her. Pat’s heartbeat has slipped out of her breast, is swimming south.

“Very much yes,” Pat says, hoping she doesn’t sound as thirst-strangled as she feels.

“Aaaand I’m off the hook,” says Jo.

Pat tries not to fall all over herself in her haste to follow Vicky into the back lounge. The door has barely latched behind them when Vicky’s towel drops; Pat moans involuntarily just at the sight. She moves towards Vicky and Vicky steps back, a playful smile tugging her pretty lips. This girl is so incredibly sexy it makes Pat go a little insane.

“Was thinking about you in the shower,” Vicky smiles. Pat is obsessed with this one particular curve of Victoria’s waist, where her stomach dips low and the padding of her hip crests high, a perfect snow-soft hourglass cleave of flesh that rises to meet the sweet taper of her ribcage. Pat likes to trace it, to experiment with fitting it into handfuls, to mark it softly with her mouth. She feels rather reverent about Victoria. Women’s bodies are cathedrals, sites of worship, holy artifacts living. It makes Pat want to get on her knees.

“Yeah? Thinking what?” Pat asks. She moves closer again. Vicky evades. Little gems of water in her pubic hair catch the light, matching the diamond in her navel sparkle for sparkle.

“Thinking I like you a lot,” Vicky says.

“I like you too,” says Pat, who is salivating, who would say anything and is pleased to say something true. “This is all happening on such an accelerated timeline for me. Usually I’ve got a minimum three years of identity confusion and pining before I even kiss a girl, but with you—”

“We went on three dates and then effectively started living together,” Vicky finishes. “Forget U-hauls, we’re lesbians with tour buses.”

“Not that I wanted our first time to be in a bunk or anything? But yeah, trust me, all the proximity and boredom really sped things up.”

“ _Boredom_ ?” Vicky arches a dark brow, makes a move as if to pick up her towel. “I mean, we can play Scrabble if you’re only doing me ‘cuz you’re _bored_...”

Pat intercepts Victoria’s path to her towel, catches her around the waist, and buries her face in the sweet curve of the taller girl’s neck before she can dodge away. Pat licks a water droplet and hums with pleasure. “You know, Scrabble sounds pretty good,” she growls into Vicky’s neck. Her mouth wet, her breath hot, she asks, “Should we do that instead?”

“No, nope, this is good,” Vicky half-laughs, half-whimpers. “This is extremely—” Pat’s tongue flicks again, tracing a water drop to its source on Vicky’s jaw— “good.”

And Pat doesn’t think about working on the nebulous, shaky tracks of the new album again for the rest of the night.

*

For five seconds, Pete almost sleeps on the bus.

The five seconds til she’s walking alongside one of the back windows and hears the moaning. Til she sees a hand pressed against glass. Til she sees the back of a dark head with long, rucked-up hair.

Then she’s tucking a strand of her own chunky, jagged, over-straightened bob behind her ear. She’s fishing her cell phone out of her back pocket and wheeling around. She’s sleeping on the Cobra Starship bus again, ‘cuz she knows they’ve got an empty bunk. There are things she can deal with tonight, and things that she can’t.

She’s dialing Ash’s number without looking, her fingertips knowing its imprint by muscle memory, automatic as a heartbeat. It’s not the part of Ash Simpson a good girlfriend would know by heart, maybe, but Pete’s working with what she’s got.

In five seconds, Ash’s sleepy voice jumbles through Pete’s phone.

Pete breathes again.

*

Jo Trohman has been the heart and soul of this band since she was 16 years old.

Sometimes she still can’t believe her luck.

Tonight’s like that.

She comes out on the stage before the show ever starts, is only a little knocked back by the rising cries as she’s recognized. Her thick hair triangles out around her head, giving her away immediately. She walks to the edge of the stage, waves at the crowd, feels the rushing tide of their response slapping against her, warm with undertow. It is a good feeling. She raises a hand at one half of the venue and they clamor and scream. She raises a hand at the other half and they yell louder.

“I feel like god up here,” she jokes into the microphone, which is an astonishing thing for a good Jewish girl to say to 5,000 people, but here they are. “What else can I get you guys to do? Can I get you to jump?”

A good number of heads bob, a wave of vertical movement rippling through the crowd. Jo squints, shields her eyes with her hand, and says, “Well, that was disappointing. I said, can I see you JUMP?”

Better, much better this time.

“Okay, that’s more like it,” she says. “How about parting the Red Sea? Guess I’m Moses now. Can I get you to—yeah, like that—make an aisle. Clear an aisle, guys. You’re beautiful, Tucson. Wow. Look at you go. Okay, perfect! Now I want everyone—each and every one of you—to take five big steps back. Like, giant steps. Come on, I’ll count you out. One… two… You know who I am, right? You know who’s asking? I’m Jo Trohman, one of the kick-ass babes from Fall Out Boy! Yeah! That band you’re here to see! We’ve got such an awesome show lined up for you tonight, Hey Monday’s gonna be out to kick us off in just a few minutes, and I _really_ need you guys to take those five steps back before the show can start. Let’s try again. One.... two.... yes, beautiful, babes, three… four… five. Perfect.”

Jo dips a leg off the edge of the stage, kicking her foot into the little moat that’s been cleared of bodies. The kids in the front row, now about 10 feet back, stare bug-eyed. It reminds her a little of squirrels, like she can’t _quite_ trust them not to rush the stage, pull her off of it, tear her apart with their grabby hands. “Look at this space! Beautiful! Will you guys be chill if I come down? Will you?”

She sits on the edge of the stage, lets her feet dangle like it’s a body of water down there. The security team twitches on the periphery of her vision. There’s a few venue security guys and then the two hypercompetent women Island employs on their behalf. Jo feels as safe as she feels anywhere, except for the twitchy squirrel eyes.

Jo hops down onto the venue floor, her boots slapping the concrete in a way that floods her with the memory of a hundred different shows, venues she’s been sneaking out to since before she had boobs, concrete she’s sweated and bled on, elbows she’s taken, amazing bands she’s heard. Her boots strike the floor and the memory of her own self, her music, her life, reverberates through her. Yes: this floor is the right place to be. She turns her back to the kids, just for a minute, to survey the stage from down here. She says into her mic, “Wow. This whole set-up looks pretty impressive. I bet Cobra Starship is gonna look _amazing_ up there! And just wait til you see my friend Willow Beckett and her band The Academy Is!”

The kids cheer their agreement. She peers beyond the pit, to the seating in the back, up the sides. She waves to the people on the balcony level. She’s got an irrational fear that someone’s gonna jump too hard up there and fall all the way down. Maybe she should stop making them jump like a white DJ. Maybe she should order them to fly.

“Who knows what I cleared this space for?” Jo asks the assembly. “It’s a thing we do at all our shows, a trick we learned from the Riot Grrls. Shout it out if you know. Go on, tell me what the rule is at a Fall Out Boy show!”

And just like they do every night, even though she still can’t believe it even when it’s happening, the crowd begins to yell it out. Scattered at first but unifying quickly, knitting together at sonic speeds, an inchoate chant rises from the mass of bodies and hearts and voices out there. They throw back at her tenfold every bit of sweat and soul she’s ever poured into them.

The first fully materialized word she hears is ‘girls,’ releasing a melt of well-being in Jo’s chest. Being on the road so much, away from Mark, away from family, away from the landmarks of familiarity that create a life (the bathroom countertop she partially melted with an overheated straightener; the drawer of gummy, unwanted lipsticks she nonetheless has not thrown away; the overwhelming tower of laundry that she just keeps emptying her tour duffel bag onto and _never washing_ ; the backroads she takes to her usual grocery store; regular staff to make small-talk with at restaurants and shops she’s been to before and will be at again; Shabbat dinners in the suburbs with her parents), her life has no boundaries. She’s a coloring book without any lines. Touring, and touring again, and then immediately touring again—the success of their band, being a glorified, much-photographed, usually hoarse drifter—it leaves Jo feeling a little unrooted.

This chant every night, it grounds her. It reminds her who she is and where she belongs. It gives her a home. It’s better than roots.

_Girls. Girls. Girls to the front._

Jo grins, moves the mic away from her mouth, joins her voice to the crowd’s. Together they chant: _girls to the front, girls to the front_ . And girls begin to come up the aisle Jo has made, first a trickle and then a stream. Jo shakes hands, touches shoulders, gives hugs. She moves among her people. Girls yell _I love you_ and _I’m in a band too_ and _you’re my favorite one!_ It is so very different from the kinds of things men yell. Among the buffer of girls here in the front, they’ll have safe space to dance and sing and lose their minds without worrying about gazing or groping or harassment. They also make a shieldwall for the girls onstage, saving them from being able to hear the cruder screams, feel the slimy heat of lewd stares, getting their ankles caught by men’s snaking hands.

The girlspace, the girlwall, the girl army: it is Jo’s very favorite thing about Fall Out Boy shows.

Hands are pressed, hugs are exchanged, hearts are buoyed. Her feet peel up from that show-floor concrete that she can feel all the way in her bones and she climbs back onto the stage. She can’t quite believe she belongs up here instead of down there and, at the same time, has always known it. It’s the only way she, or her life, makes sense. Jo looks down at their fans and feels herself shining, aglitter with the magic of girls.

“Thanks, everyone,” she says, and she chokes a little on the sudden swell of emotion. She cries every time. “Now get ready for Hey Monday. I wanna see you respecting each other out there, okay? Creeps get thrown out. See you soon, ladies! Let’s have the best night of our lives!”

*

Andy’s ears are still ringing with Pete’s final speech to the crowd as the automatic door chimes and they step into the fluorescent glow of some random Walgreens in Tucson, Arizona. Not that you can ever tell what state you’re in, from inside drugstores: they are surreal, interchangeable places, vacuum-sealed corporate biomes that self-replicate up and down the length of every U.S. highway.

You’d think that this would mean Andy knows where to find what they’re looking for, but you’d be wrong. Every Walgreens is identical-but-not in a disorienting, funhouse mirror way. It makes Andy feel like they’re trapped in a nightmare.

Well, they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. The last thing Pete said tonight was:

 _We only believe in us because you believe in us. We only_ exist _because you believe in us. You’re the ones we’re writing songs for, you’re the reason we’re on this stage, you’re the reason that we ever made it out of a garage in Chicago. That’s why I know you can do anything. You believe in us and now we’re pumping through your speakers with how loud we believe in you. You weird kids out there, you freaks, you monster girls, you kids who are too much and not enough at once: we believe in you. You made us real. You can do anything._

“You can do anything,” Andy repeats to themself, muttering under their breath as they march with a confidence they do not feel towards what they can only hope is the pharmacy section.

Three hundred brand options and styles for condoms, exactly three options for what they’re here for—fuckin’ ridiculous, Andy thinks. Still, overwhelmed as they are by the absence of choices, they dawdle, reading and rereading packages. Weighing the options that are not options. Or: weighing options that are not in this store, but out in the world, possibility and flesh. Blood and clusters of cells.

Andy thinks about the band, the band and the girls that saved their life. That gave them the courage to be who they are, that gave them the safety and language to figure out who that was in the first place.

Andy thinks about how the band is gonna change. Because—here in this position, shopping for an item they thought they would never in a million lifetimes need—they know. Without even seeing the result, they know. They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t already certain. No one does this, unless they have a wild joyful and/or panicked suspicion that is driven by an underlying, organic _certainty_. Andy never expected they would be able to feel that certainty, thought that the same biology that enabled it in others would outlaw it in their skin, bones, and womb, but there it is, sure as their own heartbeat: a deep knowing.

In the end, tired of twitching there between condoms and tampons (equally mocking) with their tattooed arms and thick-framed glasses, their painstakingly toned muscles and fuzzy needs-to-be-shaved head, Andy grabs a box based on the feeling of luck. Pale blue and white with calm black letters, third one on the hook, feels like The One. As if the universe’s die hasn’t already been cast and all this test will do is reveal it, as if they can still manipulate probability and fate with which box they choose: ridiculous. Still, Andy buys the box that feels best.

The cashier plainly has no idea what to do with them. Andy watches the mental calculations flitting across the man’s eyes: hopeful father? expectant mother? amorphously gendered entity with uncertain motives? Middle-aged, thin-faced, white, he’s clearly the kind of person who can’t let this particular box through his check-out lane without making _some_ kind of comment. (You know the type. They’re usually men.) Finally he settles on an uneasy, “Uh, hope it’s what you want it to be. Hope you know what that is!” He laughs too late and too sharp, turning an uncomfortable joke into a true discomfort that he, Andy, and the rest of the late-night Walgreens line can share.

“No bag, no receipt,” Andy says. It’s the maximum they’re willing to engage with this dude. They swipe their debit card and wait.

“Guess you can’t really return it! Ha!” Everything about this moment is awful, and so Andy just stares at him. “Do you have a rewards card, ...friend?” Dude asks, clearly needing to categorize Andy _somehow_ and unsatisfied by the spectrum of ‘sir’ to ‘miss.’ (Andy can relate. _Hey, me too, buddy_ , they don’t say.)

“No bag, no receipt, no rewards,” Andy amends their previous statement. “Can you just process my payment?”

He makes a face like he’s decided what Andy is, and that is a bitch: gendered at last. “No need to be nasty,” he mutters, handing over the pregnancy test along with the receipt Andy has repeatedly declined. Yep. Definitely this guy thinks Andy is a woman. Nobody talks to them this way if they get read as a dude.

Andy just takes the receipt. At this point, they will do anything to get out of this Hotel California Walgreens situation. All they want to do is bring this crystal ball back to the bus and see the future.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thankyouthankyouthankyou. Let me know what you're thinking and feeling! See you next Friday for more. <3


	2. everyone else is just as terrified as you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is piss, punching, and press.
> 
>  
> 
> [(and a soundtrack for all of the above)](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Pete’s got the best bad luck.

Another sunset, another city, another chance to strike out. Clovers just don’t grow with that many leaves. Love me, love me not: petals drop.

Pete’s had a lot of stupid sex in her life, under bad circumstances or with bad people, with inadequate protection or inadequate consent. So it’s a surprise, really, that this situation is new to her. She’s always been the kind of girl who oughtta get bulk discounts on pee sticks and STD swabs, right? But the truth is, Pete hasn’t fucked anyone who produced sperm in like, years. She wasn’t really intending to—bisexuality exists, but so does misogyny, and sometimes they cancel each other out. She isn’t on birth control: it makes her tits hurt, makes her spot randomly throughout the month. She just doesn’t fuck with it.

But maybe she should have gotten back on it, when she met Ash. She thought they were careful, but she never really is.

The stupidest part of this situation—or at least, the part she’s channeling all her frustration into at this particular moment, since the rest is more than she can deal with—is that she couldn’t even buy the damn test herself. She learned that to her sorrow last night, in Carson City, where four different people did double-takes and started whispering at the sight of her. Cell phones appeared, indiscreet flashes: anything she bought was gonna be on the internet at the speed of 4G. She panicked, left the drugstore with a pack of tampons she wished she needed and burning cheeks, feeling stupid for thinking that she could just walk into a CVS like a person who’d never been naked on the internet and buy a fucking pregnancy test. How dumb can she get?

At least she made it out before anyone approached her. Pete Wentz Buys Athletic Tampons is probably blowing up on TMZ.

She can’t just send one of their crew members for it either, the way she might send them on a coffee run. This is a secret, this thing that may or may not be growing inside her. This is one damn thing she wants to keep for herself. So she has to send the only human being she can rely on utterly, the one human she knows from experience will stand by her no matter what, the one human she can trust to never judge, disappoint, or betray her.

She sends Andy.

In Tucson, Arizona, Pete paces up and down the venue parking lot, weaving in between buses and equipment trailers, waiting for Andy to return. She fists her hands up against her abdomen as if she can feel the life-or-not quickening there. She can’t bear to call Ash and hear his voice. She can’t bear to think about what she’s gonna do next. She just keeps counting out the days since her last period again and again, trying to remember how long it’s been, but she’s never been the kind of woman who keeps good count. Her period surprises her all the time: she ruins so much underwear. Now its absence surprises her. No matter how she counts it, it adds up to _it’s been too long_.

Add to the list of things she can’t bear: being in her own head right now. She wishes she could talk to Pat, but what’s the fucking point of wishing? Just throw a fucking quarter down a well and be done with it. Instead she becomes someone else for a little while, crosses the security border, finds the cluster of hopeful fans still outside the venue. She smiles, she autographs, she hugs, she poses for pictures. She lingers overlong with a cluster of preteen girls, glitter-streaked and beautiful in that undamaged way of youth. Pete lingers, and does not think about motherhood. She does not think about daughters, or what hers would look like, or what shows she’d go to when she was old enough, or what men would say to her there. Pete talks to the girls brightly, kindly, and does not think of anything at all. And if she catches herself grinding her fist into her stomach, palpating it with her palm, _feeling_ for truth or sorrow inside herself? She doesn’t think about that either.

The girls notice Andy’s return before Pete does. “Oh my god, I think that’s _Andy!”_ one of them whisper-shrieks, elbowing the girl next to her.

“Wanna meet them?” Pete asks. The girls clutch each other and nod so vigorously Pete fears they’ll topple. She waves Andy over and proceeds to panic, a little, as Andy ambles towards them with the pregnancy test _right in their hand_ . Of course Andy didn’t get a bag. When has Andy ever gotten a bag? Their concern for the environment means that anyone might have snapped a picture of them with _that_ in their hand.

Pete jogs over to Andy, hugs them way too tight around the middle, and hisses into their ear, “ _Put that in your fucking pocket_.”

“What?” asks Andy.

There’s no time. The girls are taking pictures already. Pete grabs the box from Andy and, pocketless, shoves it under her shirt and into her pants. Andy just blinks at her, because honestly, it’s a weird thing to do. It is. That’s fair.

Pete drags Andy over to the girls, hoping to distract everyone from her bizarre behavior. Andy hugs and signs too, and everyone’s happy. All Pete can think about is pissing on a stick. She’s hypervigilant to her bladder sensations: does she have to pee? Is she just anxious? Will she be able to produce enough urine for the test? Or is she so nervous she won’t be able to pee at all? One of the girl asks her a question that she doesn’t hear. Wild around the eyes, Pete answers by blurting out, “I have to pee. Have you guys ever been on a tour bus?”

And that’s how she ends up with a pregnancy test in her pants, leading four very underage girls onto the Fall Out Boy bus at quarter to one in the morning in Tucson, Arizona.

“You all know Jo, main babe and power guitarist?” Pete says. The girls all nod, eyes wide, mouths rounded by reverence. “She’ll give you the lowdown on tour life.”

Pete leaves the 13 year olds in the front lounge with Jo, who has been one of her primary role models for existing as a human girl and not apologizing for it for the entire time Pete’s known her. She figures that even an obviously stoned Jo will have nourishment to offer these girls that Pete, at 28, still hasn’t figured out.

She clamps onto Andy’s wrist, says, “We’ll be right back,” and drags Andy into the cramped bus bathroom with her.

“I can’t—I can’t do it alone,” she says. Her hands are shaking so bad she can’t get the flaps of the box open.

Andy takes the box from her with great gentleness. “You don’t have to,” they say. The box opens easily under their steady touch.

Andy holds Pete’s hand while she pees, squatting over the stick. Pete’s heart beats so thunderously in her ears that it drowns out all thought. She is a void between emotions, egg-shaped and hollow like she’s had a pin poked through her and the yolk blown out. She’s not terrified, not excited, not hopeful, not sick with dread. She’s not anything. She’s an incubator, waiting to become.

One pink line means no, two pink lines mean yes. Pete can’t even pull her panties up. She holds the stick in one hand and Andy’s hand in another, sitting there half-naked with her belly pooching out over a bowl of her own piss. The package says results in 1-5 minutes, but Pete’s paralyzed. Sitting here like this is the utmost of what she can do.

She’s distantly aware of Andy rubbing her back. “If you become a mom, will you stop stripping on stage?” Andy wonders.

“Opposite of that,” Pete says. “I’ll quit the band and become a full-time dancer. Pregnant chicks pole-dancing has got to be a hot source of income.”

“Ooh, and you could baby-belly-dance,” adds Andy, working the heel of their hand into tension at Pete’s shoulders. Pete can barely blink, she’s staring at the blank window of the test so hard, willing her future into being. “That would be cool. You’d dance, the baby would kick, the dollar bills would fly.”

“I don’t have to keep it,” Pete says. Her voice is small and tentative, testing out the air like it’s thin ice. “Right? Nothing has to change, no matter what the stick says.”

“Of course, babe. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. It’s always your decision.” Andy’s petting her hair now, smoothing and smoothing the over-burnt plastic-scratchy strands of it.

Pete thinks about throwing the stick on the ground, stomping it to shards with her boot heel before it can ever betray her. But in this case, this one time, truth is something physical. Truth will show up bloody and squalling, or bloody and silent. Her body will tell its tale. The stick isn’t the thing she wants to smash, really: it’s her whole life up to this point.

The lines raise, one and then the other, with silent cheerfulness. Pete feels the bottom drop out.

She slumps against Andy’s side, would fall off the toilet without Andy standing so stable beside her. Her voice comes out thick and gnarled with snot, which is when she realizes she’s crying. Tears pit-pat onto the tile. Her face and chest are wet: she’s been crying for a while.

“If it’s a boy, I’ll throw it back,” she sobs into Andy. Andy’s arms close around her, the first and last place as an adult woman she’s ever really felt safe. Pete allows herself to be rocked and Andy allows themself to be cried on.

If it’s a boy, she’ll throw it back.

*

Jo has seen Pete go off the rails before. Lots of times, lots of ways. But this is something new.

They’re in Albuquerque of all hellscapes, and there’s a weird energy long before they take the stage. It feels atmospheric, like something you’d see in a weather forecast: not just a local disruption, but a whole fucked-up system moving through. The venue gets moved at the last minute—ruptured sewage line where they were booked to play—and they’re oversold for the space they end up with.

“We can’t violate the fire code,” Dirty tells them in the dressing room, 2.5 hours before they’re meant to go on. It’s a race as to whether they’ll even have time to set up their stage show and equipment at this point. “Venue manager says not one person over 2,300 in here. I think she’ll be at the door with a counter personally. She seemed very suspicious of me.”

“And how many tickets did we sell?”

Dirty flips a page on his clipboard. “Uh, upwards of 4,000.”

Dirty still has the ghost of Sharpie cat whiskers and nose drawn on his face. Jo understands why he might be hard to take seriously. Maybe she should start making him wear a tie to meetings, since she already knows ‘no leftover drunk whiskers’ is too much to ask. Jo knows sending Dirty up against the manager again won’t end well for anyone, so she tries to work with the situation they’re actually in, not the one she wishes they were.

The situation is: the clock is ticking, kids are lined up around the block getting agitated and hearing rumors they won’t all be allowed in, Pat isn’t here to calmly support adherence to the fire code because she snuck off somewhere with Vicky-T _again_ , and Pete keeps going outside, walking the line, and promising people she’ll prop open the fucking fire doors and sneak them inside. It’s a powder keg, basically, and Jo’s at the blasting end. As usual.

“Pete, did you hear that? We’ve got almost twice as many kids out there as can fit inside this place. You have to _stop_ going out there and making promises,” Jo orders her friend. Pete has managed to put makeup on exactly one eye and is pacing around the little room, smacking Jo’s Urban Decay eyeshadow palette against her palm like she’s never heard of crumble. “We won’t have a venue at _all_ if the manager overhears you telling people that shit, and we’re not sneaking anybody in without causing, like, spontaneous combustion and stampede deaths.”

“You’re not sneaking anybody in, maybe. _I_ am,” Pete says, crossing her arms under her boobs like her cleavage is a weapon Jo is vulnerable to.

“No, you’re not.” Like so many conversations in her adult life, Jo can’t believe she’s having it. How is it _her_ job, now, to talk Pete off her bullshit? She liked it better when she managed the band, Dirty managed the tour, and Pat managed the Pete. Instead she’s off somewhere chasing Vicky-hickeys and leaving Jo to deal with this shitshow all by herself.

“Yes, I am,” Pete insists. “We’re not refunding their tickets and sending them home, we’re giving these kids the show they came here for.”

“They didn’t come here to get trampled or be packed in like a factory farm!” Jo’s voice is getting louder.

“Trampling also happens at factory farms,” Andy says, choosing to speak up for the first time to impart some fucking vegan message of wisdom, which on a better day Jo might love them for but today makes her feel decidedly chokey.

Exasperated, Jo demands, “Can you just—put the rest of your makeup on and give me a minute?”

Pete flips her off—“oh, that’s mature,” Jo mutters—and starts drawing wings on her eyelids in the tarnished dressing mirror. Jo drops her head into her hands and massages her temples.

“Let me braid your hair, JoJo,” Andy says, appearing at her side only now that the confrontation has been contained. Usually Jo loves little better than this ritual they’ve shared for the past 6 years—it makes her feel small, cared for, girlish in the way of ordering Domino’s at slumber parties, like there’s not a tangle in the world that can’t be teased out—but today she is not in the _fucking_ mood.

“Don’t soothe me,” she snaps at Andy, gathering up her big bush of unstyled hair possessively. “I don’t want to be soothed.”

 

Things get worse as showtime gets closer. Whether the manager chose to turn a blind eye or Pete is working as a vigilante, the club is _packed_ , obviously overfull and in the process of overheating by the time Cobra Starship is meant to go out and open the show. Like any crowded, too-hot group of irate strangers, things are tense and unfriendly out there. Gabby Saporta looks pale, peeking out at the restless mob from the wings. There’s a lot of pressure on openers in situations like this: Jo remembers. It wasn’t that long ago that Fall Out Boy was in the same kinds of position. She could comfort the other girl, offer some hard-earned wisdom, but tonight her mood is too foul. Pete’s the one signing baby bands, let Pete be the one who takes care of them. Jo will focus on solving the grown-up problems that _Pete has also created_.

Their openers get booed and Jo knows it’s going to be a rough night. There’s this one guy in particular, up in the pit ‘cuz Jo didn’t do _girls to the front_ tonight, the venue manager wouldn’t allow it, who is yelling especially disgusting things at Willow Beckett while The Academy Is plays. Willow is tall, slim, anemically pale, and mean as hell. Jo watches her make a rude hand gesture at the dude and try to move farther away. Jo’s so stressed and angry watching that she’s already sweated big underarm rings into her white and black striped tube dress. She doesn’t know what to do about anything so she decides fuck it, and she does nothing.

Luckily Pat has pulled herself out of Vicky’s tonsils by the time they’re up. The air in here feels bad-electric, like heat lightning might erupt from the rafters and scorch them at any moment. It’s already so hot Jo is legitimately concerned about the pyrotechnics, but they had to ditch all the below-stage stripbox action when the venue changed and Pete is flatly refusing to modify anything else about the stage visuals. Jo’s mood is poison and everyone is steering clear of her. It is with a good deal of obvious bitterness and strife between the four of them that Fall Out Boy takes the stage at last.

The very first thing that happens, even as they come out playing, even as the crowd roars a cheer, is Jo getting clocked squarely in the temple by a half-full water bottle. She goes down flat on her ass, going momentarily blind when the back of her head strikes the stage, and springs up again full of adrenaline and ready to strike.

“So this is gonna be a punk show, huh?” she yells into her mic, into the sudden silence where her bandmates have dropped the opening song in their concern. “Fuck you too, Albuquerque!”

And she rips back into the chords of Thriller like she’ll tear apart her own guitar.

The ugly energy of the night feeds back into itself, a scorpion stinging its own back. This is the bleached-bone, drought-dead winter desert, not the romantic shimmering heat and saguaros from white tourists’ postcards. The flames rise up around her and Jo feels like a demon, sweat and smoke stinging her eyes and her floor-length, high-slit skirt swirling around her legs. She strikes the stage with her boots like she’ll split it. She runs and jump-kicks and spins perilous on top of her amp. She plays guitar-to-guitar with Pat like she’s about to headbutt the singer, whipping her hair and sweat as she headbangs; she lifts her guitar in the air and plays in Andy’s face before launching herself off the drum riser. She and Pete circle one another, tension building, til every strained moment from the bus and the tour and the album and the whole damn band is there onstage with them, boiling-burning to a furious head.

This is her band. This is Jo’s band. It always was. Pete and Pat made it about _them_ , _their_ chemistry and _their_ love and _their_ weird, beautiful cryptophasic writing process that has no room for Jo, and now they’re ruining everything Jo has built with _their_ breakup and bad blood, and Jo is so fucking frustrated she’s going to explode. She screams her backing vocals like she wants to be mute in the next 3 cities. She looks out into the crowd and doesn’t see her girls, doesn’t see herself, just sees the churning yelling masses who beaned her with a fucking water bottle. She sees the people who invade their privacy and drag them through tabloids and want them in leather onesies so some fucking _dude_ at Island Records can profit. She sees the people who think they owe them any damn thing, when all they’re trying to do is what they love best and maybe share it with a few people on the way. She sees _men_ , including that fucker who kept coming at Willow, clamoring and grabbing and  yelling and clobbering the kids next to them, and fuck everything because this band isn’t _for_ them.

At one point, Jo screams, “Let’s start a riot! Let’s start a fucking riot!” At another, she grabs a handful of her own skirt and tears until the fabric rips, the sound of it lost in the screams, the slit climbing jagged up to her waist now, and she just sways harder and dances faster and jumps higher, so the glimpses of her half-bare ass and the triangle of her panties are always in motion and shadow. Like if she moves fast enough, no one can touch her. If she moves fast enough, she’ll never get hurt again.

She’s in her own world of stage lights and anger and fire, isn’t really watching her band or the crowd the way she usually would, and so doesn’t notice something is going wrong til Pat yells. Jo looks up from far away to see her friend’s ankle caught, that same dude who was fucking with Willow with his _hands on Pat_ , and their security guard Marcela muscles over and pries him loose, and the guy pops her in the face.

There’s a spray of noseblood and then chaos. Before Jo knows what’s happening, Pete has launched herself off the stage and into the crowd. In a flash of silver rings, her fists rain down on the guy. Pat tries to haul a young-looking girl who’s close to the fray up onstage where she won’t get trampled; bleeding, Marcela tries to pull Pete off the guy, while another security woman tries to get through the crowd to restrain the dude. It’s like a chum bucket has been thrown in the waves: the mosh pit has turned into a bar brawl, or a deleted scene from _300_. The people trying to get out collide with those trying to get in. Fists and feet are flying everywhere. The violence eats across time so it feels like an eternity til Jo can get to Pat; together they get the girl on the stage, to safety, but by then other people have the same idea and are climbing up. Jo can’t see Pete anymore. It feels like a fucking zombie movie.

“Lights!” Andy is hollering into their mic. “We need some fucking lights!”

By the time the house lights come up, the floor in the pit is slick with blood. Black eyes, busted teeth, and broken noses proliferate. Kids emerge with bruised ribs and bloody knuckles, some grinning like freshly blooded warriors and others trembling like goddamn leaves. Among them, Pete rises like a queen, her brow bleeding from a gushing cut and her hands and arms streaked red. The crowd lifts her. Andy shoves back fans who are taking things too far, now that they’ve gained the stage. Venue security has joined forces with the band’s two-woman security team and starts pulling apart pairs of brawlers. Jo is panting like she’s run a race, clutching Pat’s arm like it’s the only unmoving point in the universe.

“What the fuck is going on tonight?” Pat keeps asking, her voice faint and wobbling. No one has an answer.

*

Pat Stump could have lived a long and happy life without ever reading the words ‘ _Brawl Out Boy?!_ ’ across the top of the entertainment section of a daily newspaper, really she could have. The subheading reads ‘ _Chicago Hardcore Antics Tear Tour Apart_ ,’ just in case she forgets three venues have already canceled their show since they illegally overpacked a venue and Pete threw herself into the crowd to attack a fan.

She’s scowling at the newspaper over breakfast when Pete Wentz herself deigns to walk in. Three days out from the fight and Pete’s still got bruised knuckles and this smug-yet-hangdog look on her face. Pat is annoyed by all of it.

“I have read two different articles this morning implying you punched that guy because of your period and this is why girl bands will never be successful,” Pat says.

“Ooh, maybe People magazine will do a Period Madness spotlight on me. I can talk about my wandering uterus and bite the head off a gummy bear or something,” Pete says blithely, as if she isn’t concerned at all that they’re in the middle of a tour and their shows are drying up around them, that if they have to refund all these tickets because they can’t find venues they will not only break the hearts of kids around the country and alienate their fanbase, but go totally bankrupt as a band.

“Yeah, let’s definitely perpetuate misogynist stereotypes,” Pat seethes. She spoons cereal into her mouth violently.

“I punched him because he was a dick and he put his hands on you.” Pete rolls her eyes. “Same reason I always punch dudes, isn’t it? Defending your virtue.”

“Which I have _never_ asked you to do,” Pat points back. “My _virtue_ is not worth an entire tour, and it’s also _not your fuckin’ business_ anymore, is it?”

“Jesus, Pat,” Pete says, grimacing. She pours herself a mug of black coffee, takes a sip, and then spits it into the little galley sink. “Can I even drink this?” she mutters to herself. Pat chooses not to involve herself in whatever coffee drama is going on. To her, Pete says, “You’re not the only person in the world, Patricia. I was defending the virtue of a _lot_ of girls, including Willow and Marcela. I’m not gonna stand by and just watch some dude mistreat girls at a Fall Out Boy show. Like, that’s the one place in the world I have a platform, have power. You can’t expect me to—”

“What? Behave in a way that allows us to _keep_ playing Fall Out Boy shows? You’re right, that _does_ seem like too much to ask of you.” If Pat rolls her eyes any harder, they will get stuck in her brain. “We’re _visible_ now, we show up in print. So you can’t just do whatever the fuck you want to. That’s what _you_ told _me_ , remember?”

“Pat. This isn’t about—”

“No. I’m not done. This is my life, my _career_ . I am not a backup singer at the Pete Wentz Superbowl show. No one is asking you to just stand by and watch. But could you possibly consider options like stopping the show and getting someone removed _before_ you dive into the pit and start punching? You _do_ have a platform. Fucking use it for something other than taking your clothes off.”

Pat doesn’t give a shit what Pete has to say to that. She throws her bowl of cereal in the sink, yet another problem to deal with later, and storms off the bus before Pete can reply. (But not before she notices that Pete’s not even trying to reply. That Pete has never tried to stop her from walking away. That Pete never calls her bluff. That Pat doesn’t ever know if Pete even wants her to stay.)

(Except for the one time when Pete absolutely, definitely, _apparently_ didn’t want her to stay.)

(But Pat doesn’t think about that time. Really. She doesn’t. They broke up, and she’s totally okay.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for tolerating a cis girl telling nonbinary stories. i welcome feedback and corrections as ever, cuz no amount of research is a substitute for living a trans or gender expansive life. <3 
> 
> see you guys next friday, UNLESS I SEE YOU TOMORROW AT THE WRIGLEY SHOW!!!


	3. this is what makes us girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Andy saves healthcare, Jo has to do everything her damn self, and Pete confesses and does not confess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday, my babes! traveling for a conference this weekend and I owe you guys lots of comment replies and crying and love. the pilgrimage to Wrigley last weekend changed my goddamn life, I spent so much time with amazing friends (new and old--these friends are, these friends are golden, my mood is best described as Homesick at Space Camp) and the inner workings of mania. I screamed and cried so much i lost my voice. so please enjoy this chapter, hit me up with your thoughts & dreams, and I'll see you next week.
> 
> [tunes, of course](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Tonight they’re playing in San Francisco, and Andy’s on a field trip.

The advance for the next record is how they’re paying for this, so you know, no pressure there. They just have to not think about what will happen if the rest of their tour tanks and the label cancels the new record and demands the advance back, and they’re golden. That, and they need the courage to walk into the goddamn appointment in the first place. They’re far from home and they don’t have the best track record with medical professionals.

Andy enters the lobby three times before they even make it to the elevator. In a cold sweat, they keep turning around and walking back out of the building. By the time they make it to the floor their appointment is even on, they are exactly eight minutes late. They bust into the waiting room half-panicked, convinced that not only has their full legal name probably been called out forty times already (despite their specific instructions about names when they made the appointment), but that their appointment has been canceled and they’ve been banned from the clinic for life due to tardiness.

Andy has been spending too much time with Pat. Andy’s becoming an anxious catastrophe. But then, it makes sense to approach a moment like this with… a certain gravity. Andy has been trying to make their body into a real home their whole life. At 28, that’s finally starting to seem like a financial and medical possibility.

They haven’t told anyone where they’re going.

The thing is, doing this isn’t a choice.

It’s okay, during the day, wearing the binder. It’s fucking  _ uncomfortable _ , especially when they’re drumming for two hours under stage lights and sweating through every layer, but when they catch their reflection in a storefront or see press photos, it’s okay. It’s a body they can live in, or at least, from the outside it appears to be.

Beaches, tank tops, disrobing at girls’ houses, changing rooms, at the gym, after getting caught in the rain. There are times when it’s not just inconvenient, the binder, but fucking crushing. (Not just literally.) There are times when just seeing the strap or outline of the thing, so like the too-small sports bras Andy always used to wear, feels as bad as seeing the tits themselves.

Even alone at home in their own bed, the lumps on Andy’s chest give them this dizzy-sick lurch, numbed small and manageable by long repetition. It’s like smothering, like their lungs don’t work. All the years of getting used to it make it worse. It is an everyday violence Andy is obligated to enact on themself.

So if Andy has to hear any of their friends say,  _ are you sure _ or  _ what made you decide  _ or  _ is this really the best time for it _ , they do not know what it will cost them.

Andy has scoured Google, biting their lips chapped and bloody with anxious excitement. They’ve read medical guides and trans help forums and personal stories on blogs. They’ve memorized more about full mastectomies and the different surgical options than most doctors probably do. The one thing they don’t know, the one thing about this procedure they’re really here to ask, the thing that scares them most, is:

_ How long til I can drum again? _

A very nice clerk makes copies of their insurance card and driver’s license. Andy doesn’t have to wonder what gender marker is in their medical record; there’s a big female symbol right on the manilla tab. Seeing it has that familiar salt-water sting. Andy fills out the registration forms and doesn’t mind so much these days, that there’s no box to check that fits them: they don’t especially want to be in a box. They can’t do what Pete does. Usually they just leave the gender boxes blank. Who thinks of themself as ‘other,’ anyway?

Andy has a paperback copy of  _ Ishmael _ stuffed into the pocket of their cargo pants, and they try to focus on reading while they wait for their name to be called. It’s a little like waiting for a gun to go off. They jump at every sound, their heart slamming against their breastbone, til finally a nurse calls, “Hurley? Andr—Andy Hurley?”

The physical exam goes by in a streaky blur. Colors run, making the whole world humid. Andy feels like they’re peering out at the examining room from inside a stained-glass heart, warped and red and rushing. They have not allowed a doctor to examine them in nearly a decade. They have always said they prefer their odds with undetected cervical cancer than with a fucking pap smear, and they’re not in a hurry to listen to a cisgender medical professional tell them about the risks and dangers of chest binding, especially when no one has ever wanted to listen to  _ them _ talk about the risks and dangers of living in the chokehold of dysphoria. Andy is measured and weighed, shucked of their clothes, given a thin paper gown. They wrap it tightly around themself and wait for the doctor to come.

Dr. Rassi enters the room with his nose in Andy’s chart. He’s young, Black, handsome, and everything about his easy air of cisgender comfort—plus that big pink Venus symbol stuck to the chart—puts Andy on edge. Even more on edge. Andy is discovering finer and finer blades of discomfort to exist upon.  They wait to slip. They wait to fall to shreds on the razors below. Instead, they dance on pinheads, swirling exhausted and never daring to slow down.

Still rifling through the chart, Dr. Rassi greets them without eye contact. “You’re from Chicago, looks like?”

“Um, yeah. I see your like, big pink flag on my chart? And I want you to know I’m nonbinary, I use they/them—”

“It’s an artifact of the medical system,” the doctor says. “Don’t stress out about it. We just need a way to quickly indicate baseline biology. It’s purely clerical.”

“It makes me uncomfortable,” Andy can’t stop themself from saying. “Like you said, I came here all the way from Chicago because your clinic is supposed to specialize in trans and nonbinary healthcare, and you’re obviously out-of-network for my insurance so I’m paying a lot for this. If I wanted pink fucking stickers, like, I could have gone anywhere. And it’s not clerical, it’s social? It impacts how all of your staff and all of the doctors here are going to see me, think of me, refer to me—” 

Andy’s so nervous, words are coming out at machine-gun pace. They might just keep building pressure and speed til they’re screaming, except right in the middle of their rant, Dr. Rassi peels up the edge of the pink sticker and rips it off. A manila corner of the chart comes with it. He looks unconcerned by the mangling of Andy’s medical record as he drops the pink flap into the trash. 

“You’re right,” he says, and he’s making eye contact now. “Anyone who needs to know details about your birth organs can check the history section on the  _ inside _ of your chart. I’ll bring the issue to Dr. Crane. It shouldn’t be too much trouble to acquire nonbinary or gendervariant stickers for certain charts. I mean, they’re stickers. There’s no reason for our patients to experience distress and risk mistreatment over stickers.”

The rant has entirely dropped out of them. Andy’s mouth hangs open. They have never had a doctor speak to them like this. They have never had any adult in power (Andy’s not quite in the habit of thinking of themself as a person with adult authority yet; being in a touring rock band is a protracted adolescence)  _ listen _ to them like this.

“Oh. Well. Thank you,” they say.

“It is the least we can do,” says the doctor. “I’m glad you pointed it out.” He smiles kindly. Against all odds, Andy feels themself begin to relax.

*

Five years ago they didn’t even have one record. Now Jo is smoking herself out to cope with the prospect of their fourth. She takes the ferry to Alcatraz with Gabby Saporta, and they sneak out to the Cellhouse and get stoned behind the salt-streaked walls of an important historical site. The tour is on rocky ground since Pete’s stunt with the punching—a band meeting about this is inevitable, but honestly, for today Jo is avoiding it—and Pat is dealing with her anxiety about it by frantically harassing Jo to sit down and write with her.

The thing about Jo, though, is that she’s not Pete. So she doesn’t engage with the songwriting process the way Pat expects and needs her to, and then she has to deal with the unacknowledged avalanche of Pat’s repressed feelings every time she disappoints. It’s not what she wanted, all the times she griped about being excluded. To be a pisspoor Pete substitute is not what she was hoping for at all.  

Listen. Fame, fortune, notoriety: all of it’s great. It’s exhilarating, it’s amazing, it’s better than Jo ever imagined. They’re really  _ making it _ , one of the biggest girl bands in recent memory, even if everyone always insists on calling them a  _ girl band _ like it’s a fucking genre. Jo loves it. Jo is having the time of her life. Jo is doing what she is meant to be doing, she knows it. Jo thanks her luck every day.

And: it’s not how she imagined it would be.  _ They _ aren’t how she imagined they’d be.

It’s so much harder than it was in high school, when everything was possible.

So she passes a joint back and forth with Gabby Saporta, leans up against her friend’s bony shoulder and shelters from the chilly breeze in the comfort of the other girl, and Jo Trohman gets high.

“How many of our shows were canceled today?” Gabby asks later, while they wind through the dreary hallways of the former prison, stumbly and stoned. Gabby’s black hair wisps prettily around her face, her squinty red eyes giving her the countenance of a girl on the Scottish moors in a Renaissance painting.

Jo doesn’t even need to check the count. “One,” she says, “but I talked them back in with a massive security deposit. If Pete goes into the pit again, I won’t even have to kill her. Island will.”

“I like Pete,” Gabby says with the vague air of protest.

“Me too,” says Jo. “Doesn’t mean I won’t kill her if that’s what’s best for the band.”

Gabby puts her hand in Jo’s back pocket and they continue the tour. Some of Jo’s stress rises off her with the smoke. High on this prison island, cloudy sky and whipping wind and gnarled rock, nothing holding them in but ocean, she feels better about things. She’ll rebook and renegotiate venues, she’ll get Pete to make an apology to the press, she’ll save the tour, she’ll save the band, she’ll save fucking rock and roll all by herself if she has to. She’s Jo Trohman. She can do anything.

 

“I’m not apologizing to  _ anyone _ and you can’t make me,” Pete tells her that night. Pete and Pat seem not to be on speaking terms today, which means it must be Tuesday, and Andy is a weird kind of jittery-quiet that Jo doesn’t know how to deal with. She’s not sure when she started finding more comfort from the girls outside her band than from the girls in it, but honestly, maybe tonight she’ll just play with Cobra Starship. There’s so many people onstage for their set, it’s not like anyone would notice an extra. She doesn’t usually like to do shows stoned, but tonight? Tonight she’s feeling pretty fuck it.

“You are,” Jo says.

“I’m  _ not _ . I’m not sorry. I’m not ever going to let one of our friends fight alone.”

“No one was fighting til you started fighting,” Marcela, their head security woman, points out from over by the door. Jo is absurdly grateful. There are a lot of things that are weird about having a full crew, having staff around all the time. Sometimes Jo misses when it was just the four of them locked in a van, dealing with their problems. But she won’t deny that having witnesses to back you up is a definite advantage.

“Marc, you were  _ punched in the face _ . You currently have a black eye!” Pete protests.

“But was I fighting?” Marcela asks. “No. I was protecting the band, absorbing some blows, defusing the situation. That’s my job.”

Pete, dressed tonight in a black choker necklace, a hoodie with the hood up, thick eyeliner, and skinny jeans, blinks her long eyelashes at Marcela like she cannot fathom this level of betrayal. Marcela, who is built like a butcher, stares levelly back. “I don’t know who you think I am,” Pete says, whirling back to Jo, because it’s very obvious she’s not gonna win in a fight against Marcela but Jo’s closer to her size, “but I’m not going to get up in front of fucking entertainment media and say things I don’t mean. What kind of legacy is that?”

“What kind of legacy is starting club brawls at your own sold-out shows?”

“I told you, I’m not sorry I did that. I think defending your friends is an  _ excellent _ legacy. So fuck off, Josephine.” 

This dressing room is not large enough for Pete’s glare. Jo decides to leave it.

“Band meeting,” Jo informs Dirty on her way out, because she’s so over talking directly to her supposed bandmates. “Tomorrow at 1pm. Make sure these  _ ladies and gentlepeople _ are at it.” Dirty, who really specializes more in goofy morale-building pranks and babysitting Pete than actual band and tour management, looks put out by her tone. “Chase them into the van with water balloons or angry bees or something,” Jo suggests, even though it’s fucking cold in March, because she wants to make at least one person happy tonight. “Just get them there.”

*

The show has ended, but Pat’s blood vessels haven’t yet stopped buzzing. She uses her adrenaline to glue herself to Victoria, to see if together they can outpace the crash.

Pat is fresh from stage, sweaty and gross, while Vicky’s freshly showered and probably can’t feel her underpants  _ squishing _ when she moves. If she was with a dude, Pat might apologize for this extreme level of sweatiness, might feel untouchable, might feel like something to be obscured, hidden, cleaned up, made presentable. But she’s with Vicky, Vicky who’s licked her pussy while she was bleeding, Vicky who’s participated in any number of foul tour pranks, Vicky who threw up in the street in the East Village a week before they left on tour, Vicky who has wild unruly pubes in a giant sprawl down her inner thighs, like further down her inner thighs than you might think pubes would grow. Vicky who followed Pat into Girl Country and hasn’t looked back.

Vicky who Pat has never, not once, apologized to. Vicky who Pat wants to bury herself inside of, Vicky who Pat wants to kiss open-mouthed deep, Vicky whose come Pat wants dripping down her wrists—

“Pat. Pat,” Vicky pants, breaking off mid-kiss, her hands under the elastic of Pat’s sweaty undies, here in the corner of the only mostly empty backstage gloom, here where anyone might find them. Pat rucks Vicky’s shirt up so she can smooth her hands and mouth over Vicky’s tight flat tummy, Vicky’s tits overflowing her balconette bra’s half-cups. 

“Yes?” says Pat, because that’s the only thing she’s gonna say to Victoria Asher, now or ever. Especially now.

“I’ve been thinking,” Vicky says, her longest finger swiping against Pat’s clit, like a casual accident that happens to repeat in a rhythm, “about the things we haven’t said out loud.”

Somewhere in all the horniness, Pat’s brain trips over a wild panic, threatens to drop right in. She loves doing this with Vicky, but she doesn’t love Vicky—that’s not one of the things she hasn’t said—actually she’s pretty much said to Vicky everything she’s thinking, like  _ you’re so hot _ and  _ I like you a lot  _ and  _ please god let’s get a hotel in the next town. _

But Vicky does not say what Pat fears, what Pat hasn’t really thought about ever saying again in her life. Vicky says, “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”

Pat laughs, low and dirty, Vicky’s fingers slipping inside her. It is easy to say, “Yes, Vee,  _ yes _ .”

Pat loves when it’s easy to say yes.

 

Later, they are curled together in Victoria’s bunk, damp with each other and smelling of sex, the rich-hot salt of Vicky’s pussy still on Pat’s tongue. Pat listens to Vicky’s heartbeat and Vicky traces lines on Pat’s shoulder, upper arm, breast, rib cage. Pat’s breath hitches and trips like Vicky’s spinning silk out of her. The sensation is the only thing anchoring her, stopping her from losing herself in her worries. Saying yes was easy, but Pat keeps taking her own fingers out of her mouth. Biting her nails means she’s anxious, but she’s not totally sure why. She decides to poke at her unease and see what happens.

“So… girlfriends,” Pat says. Vicky hums in agreement. “Like, official girlfriends?” Pat presses.

Vicky lifts her head from the pillow so she can frown at Pat. Up close, Pat can see the glitter and sweat spangling the crease in Vicky’s brow. “Of course official,” she says. “That’s the point, dummy.”

“Okay, but like…” Ah, yes. There it is. The anxiety is getting worse: that means Pat’s heading in the right direction. She’s starting to feel like she can’t breathe for a whole different set of reasons. “Official secret girlfriends? Official friends-and-family girlfriends? Official send out a press announcement and, like, a photo mailer girlfriends?”

“Baby. What are you even talking about?”

“There’s lots of types!” Pat insists. The ball of tension in her guts is unspooling like an oil spill, inky and thick. Once you dip your fingers in it, good luck ever feeling clean again. 

The thing Pat feels anxious about is this: Can she kiss Vicky in public? Can she hold Vicky onstage? If she does, what can she tell reporters about it? Does Vicky want her to lie? Does Vicky want her to act like she’s less than she is? Does Vicky want to be seen with her, linked to her, public and unashamed with her, or—

Or does Vicky want it to be how it was with Pete.

Does Vicky want what Pat wants, or does she want what Pete wanted.

Because it turns out Pat can only do it the one way. The real, out loud, shows up in mirrors and on film and in permanent fucking ink way. Pat can’t  _ do it in the dark with smiles on our faces. _ Pat can’t exist  _ trapped and well concealed in secret spaces _ . 

Not anymore. Not ever again.

Vicky props herself up on her elbows, the closest thing to sitting up you can do in a bunk this size. Pat slides off Vicky’s chest. The other girl frowns at her, rubbing Pat’s back not in that light, sexy way, but in a firm, comforting affirmation. “I thought there was just one type of  _ official girlfriends _ ,” Vicky says. “I was planning to call Rolling Stone and let them know as soon as we finished fucking. Cuties like us, it’s a cover story for sure. Is that not what you had in mind?”

Pat bites the edges of her own grin, suddenly bashful. “I know you’re joking,” she mumbles, tipping her face into Vicky’s collarbone so she doesn’t have to make eye contact, “but also? That means a lot to me.”

Vicky kisses the top of Pat’s head. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t mean it,” she murmurs. “I want the whole world to know.”

“We’ll make them so jealous, we’ll make them hate us,” Pat says, and doesn’t realize it’s a Fall Out Boy lyric and she’s speaking in Pete’s words again til it’s already out of her mouth. It’s okay, to have moments like that. It’s okay to forget that her life is different now. It’s a bumpy road that will smooth out with time. It will stop hurting eventually. Pat believes this. Really she does.

Pat’s drifting off to sleep before she realizes that  _ the whole world knowing _ probably also will involve  _ Pete Wentz knowing _ . She decides not to feel any sort of way about that at all.

*

Pete tells her mother. 

She doesn’t want to. She’s disappointed her mother so many times that Dale isn’t even surprised anymore when Pete fucks up: it’s what she’s come to expect. To her, it’s just  _ how Pete is _ . It’s worse because she really does love Pete anyway. Her support has never wavered. After what happened in that parking lot, she moved Pete back into her childhood bedroom without question, without applying guilt, without really even blinking. She just did what Pete needed. She’s always been patient.

Pete just wishes she was someone you could love without inordinate amounts of patience. Loved for who she is, mess and all, not in spite of it. Pete wishes love didn’t feel so much like tolerance.

But she knows she’s lucky to be tolerated. She’s grateful for it.

Pete’s mother is an attorney. A Black daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, she attended one of the best law schools in the country and became a goddamn defense attorney before her 30th birthday, like she’d never heard of odds stacked against anyone. Like she’d feed a white man his own fucking bootstraps if he didn’t show the proper respect. She wears her hair in braids, frowning wordlessly when Pete relaxes and straightens and fries her own, not hiding her curls but destroying them. She never speaks a word of disapproval out loud, though. This is a metaphor for their relationship.

“Well,” her mother says over the phone, her voice tight and without slack, a faultless fortress of a woman, “what are you going to do now, Petra?”

_ For my next trick, _ Pete thinks,  _ I’m going to disappear _ . But she’s not: for her next trick, maybe she’ll do something really amazing. Maybe she’ll start a family, settle down, make the right choices. Maybe she’ll be a mother. Maybe she’ll do the one thing no one ever believed she could: grow up. Survive.

“What I always do,” Pete says instead, because this new dream is tender. This new dream might cost everything else she ever wanted. This new dream, she doesn’t know if she wants it or fears it. But she’s 28 years old. She’s already lived so much longer than anyone thought. Who’s to say she can’t prove herself wrong again? “I just—you know there are moms in the world who would be excited at the prospect of being grandmas?”

“They have different daughters,” Dale says. In the silence afterwards, Pete’s guts twisting in a way that has nothing to do with the life brewing inside them, Pete knows she regrets it. This is also a metaphor for their relationship: Pete doesn’t need Dale to apologize to know that she regrets it. Dale doesn’t need Pete to point out that she has been cruel. Pete doesn’t need Dale to remind her of the reasons she deserves it. Dale doesn’t need Pete to forgive her.

“I’ll figure it out, Ma,” Pete says. 

“I know you will,” says Dale, and she sighs quietly, away from the mouthpiece of the phone, so Pete only hears a soft blast of it.

“Talk later,” Pete says, which she maybe means and maybe doesn’t, and gets off the phone.

Now the only person left to tell is everyone else.

 

In creature features, the monster’s only agency lies in its capacity for destruction.

Pete gets that.

Jo, on her high horse, on her warpath, on her pedestal, presides over the meeting like the Queen of Crabs. Pete doesn’t even want to look at her, but what are her other options? Jo barred staff and crew from attending, so Pete’s options are either Pat’s hickeys and or Andy’s expression of obvious concern. Pete is fine with being loathed; she knows how to metabolize it; she’s been running off clean, efficient, carbon-neutral hatred for years. Sympathy freaks her out. The look on Andy’s face right now is making her squirm.

“I’ve gathered you here today for damage control,” Jo is saying. Jo’s hair is long and fluffy, spilling down her back like an aura of curls. Lately she’s been wearing sweaters with long, stretched-out sleeves, skirts and baggy jeans. She smells like weed and vanilla extract all the time these days: Pete thinks the pot smoke’s wended its way so deeply into her hair that this will probably be her general essence for the next 30 or so years. Pete has always loved and admired Jo so much. Sometimes Jo is her best friend in the universe. Other times there is no one in the band who annoys her more.

“Four nights ago,” Jo intones, “in her infinite wisdom, Pete jacked some dude in the face. Now, she has yet to adequately explain this behavior, and she is refusing to make a public apology, despite the negative impact this event is having on  _ our  _ tour, not to mention the success and exposure of the three fledgling Decaydance bands she brought out on tour with us.”

“Am I on trial? Is this your opening statement? I would have liked to be involved in jury selection,” Pete says. She folds her hands over her abdomen, a new defensive posture she drops into without thinking.

“Pete,” Andy says. Their voice isn’t scolding, exactly, but it’s clear that like everybody else, Andy expects better of her. “Maybe you could explain to Jo what’s going on.”

Andy means,  _ tell them you’re pregnant.  _ But Pete hasn’t even decided if she wants to be pregnant. If pregnant is something she’s going to stay. She never imagined herself as a mom because she never imagined herself living. 

(No, that’s not true. There was a time with Pat, when they were together, when Pete still thought love was enough. Pat wants kids so badly, she’s gonna make such a good parent one day. Pete imagined it then. Blond little pudgeballs tumbling around a constantly cluttered house, messy but loved, kids with Pat’s eyes and Pat’s full-throated tantrums. Reading them Peter Pan in bed at night, Pat leaning in the doorway listening in, and pressing Pat against the wall in the hall after, kissing her throat so her gold lashes fluttered, Pete sliding down to her knees and tugging Pat’s mom jeans down with her, Pat’s chin tilted up and biting her lips to be quiet, their bedroom with its locking door impossibly far away, and Pete with her clever tongue right here…)

No. Pete never imagined herself as a mother. Pete never imagined herself capable of loving something without damaging it, or reliable enough to create anything good. Pete has only ever seen herself as flint and glitter and poison, the kind that goes gritty in the blood. That’s what everyone sees, when they look Pete Wentz. Pete Wentz herself is no exception.

Pete doesn’t want to make nice with her friends. Pete wants to set herself on fire. But Pete is trying to make better choices and live a healthier life, and more often than not, that means she can’t do what she wants. Her therapist is always tell her that whenever Pete  _ feels like _ doing a thing, that’s basically a blinking neon sign that means  _ do the opposite _ .

So Pete swallows her own bile and says, “I’m sorry if I hurt the band, but I’m not sorry I hurt that dude. I won’t say I am. C’mon, Jo. You take less shit than anyone. You wouldn’t say it either.”

“I’m taking shit from you right now,” Jo mutters, but Pete can see she’s softening. “Just—I’m getting grey hairs. Honest to god grey hairs. Can you just punch the next dude  _ after _ the show, off venue property? Everyone’s butt is  _ very _ clenched about liability right now.”

Andy leans over and palms Jo’s ass. “Including yours,” they say, grinning.

The tension goes out of the moment. Pete comes home from war, lays her weapons down, and looks up to find herself surrounded by friends, her best and oldest. These, these are the people who make up her life. Anything she can’t tell them isn’t even real, must not exist. It’s by speaking words to these girls that her life comes into being.

“Band announcement, I guess,” says Pat, and for a minute Pete thinks there’s part of their hearts still wrapped so close, Pat knows without Pete telling her. There was a time when anything that grew in Pete grew in Pat too. A time when hearts and heads and hands all worked in tandem. A time that sugar on Pat’s lips was sweetness on Pete’s tongue and they were bound together, truer than true, effortless but not easy.

Then Pat says, “Vicky and me, we’re gonna go public. With our relationship. So there might be some media fallout from that, but—I’m not gonna pretend to be someone I’m not. Not for the label, not for anyone. Um, I’m proud of who I am. I hope you guys are too.”

Andy and Jo both mob Pat, hugging and clasping and crying out unconditional support. Pete could have had that, if she’d spoken a moment sooner. Pete could have that still. Instead, she lets the shockwave wash over her, a wave she’s all too ready to sink into. There’s ringing or else roaring in her ears. Because this is why, after everything, she and Pat broke up.

 


	4. pink like the holes in your heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pat is a queer hero, Andy _asks_ , and a band can be a home.
> 
> [songs to break your own heart to](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Pete decides not to tell her friends in a group after all. 

She waits, the tour spooling out around them. She makes statements to the press about how she’s never gonna let any girl or any friend of hers fight alone, how she’ll be there to deliver punch-justice to anyone who gropes a girl at a Fall Out Boy show. Someone runs a story about all the different clubs and bars she’s been thrown out of, and some of the tales printed are legitimate, and some name places Pete has never been to. Her notoriety grows. She avoids phone calls from the label. She avoids phone calls from her boyfriend. She strips on stage, performing her own consumption day in and day out, and thinks about how the days of her taut tan tummy are numbered. She hopes it spiderwebs with stretchmarks like a prize-winning pumpkin, hopes it gets so huge she’s monstrous, haglike, obscene in her fertility, dripping with it, ripe and sensual. She hopes this happens overnight, so that one night she titillates and the next she horrifies. She wants to be the witch in all the fairy tales. She wants to steal a baby from a nice normal life and spirit them both away to live in a crumbling tower, feasting on rampion and sending curses by post to all their critics and enemies.

She decides she’ll tell people individually, one at a time, once she has a plan. Once she’s so obvious there’s no going back. (That’s the Pete Wentz way to make confessions.) Pat, maybe she’ll tell in Morse code tapped against the dividing wall between their bunks. Jo, she’ll whisper it to in a dark room. Andy, she’ll pass a note to. Just as long she doesn’t have to look in anyone’s eyes.

She writes a post for the band forum and leaves it in Drafts, unpublished, unbecoming.  _ there’s a thing in me that might be a child and might be redemption and maybe, just maybe, could be both. i’m growing a reason to live and keep living inside me. it’s lower than the heart. lower than I expected. but maybe the womb is the heart too. maybe families dont have to be assembled out of the lost&found box. maybe you can gather up scraps and knit something new. maybe you can grow your own home, build a house with your bones, put life inside it. i think i want to meet my maybe-baby. _

Pete keeps her palm pressed to her belly, waiting for something to press back. Feeling for a heartbeat, a tiny sparrow’s echo, violet and faint, tripping in the too-big footsteps of her own. But her flesh is just flesh, the woman just a woman. There’s nothing in there, not really, not yet.

*

All of a sudden, Pete starts taking the new record so seriously that Pat wants to murder her.

“You’re  _ filling  _ my laptop with potato chip crumbs,” she grouses. Pete is leaning over her so far she’s basically on top of her, eating Zapp’s by the handful. Her smile shines with grease. Her breath smells like powdered flavor. They’re in the back lounge on the Fall Out Bus with three weeks left of tour, and after two and a half months of no one giving a shit, Pete is suddenly desperate to hear every demo.

“When do you think we’ll be ready for the studio? Soon, right? Like, definitely the album will be finished before, ummm… November? Like if we get into the studio by, I don’t know, July at the latest—”

Pat swats Pete’s hair out of her face. “Get  _ off _ of me, you weigh a thousand pounds,” Pat complains. Pete is slowly compacting her from above, tipping the majority of her weight onto Pat’s one shoulder. “Doesn’t July seem fast? I mean, it’ll be mid-May when we finally get off tour. I need like, a minute before I’m gonna be churning out material good enough to take to studio—”

“Pat. Patty. Patricia,” pesters Pete.

“What.”

“That’s ridiculous. We both know that’s ridiculous. You’ve been churning out good material this whole tour.”

“But not  _ Fall Out Boy _ material,” Pat protests. “I’ve been like, dicking around by myself, mostly.”  _ And with Vicky _ , Pat doesn’t say. In reality, she’s written quite a lot of strange, ambitious stuff that involves horn sections and heavy electronic elements, as-yet unrealized ideas that pull from her work on Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes and Panic! as much as Fall Out Boy, sounds that crawled up from the depths of her record collection, songs that would make David Bowie want to dance. She thinks. She hopes. They’re nowhere near ready for other people’s ears. As a vocalist, even, Pat doesn’t feel ready yet to really sing them, at least not as she wants them heard. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pete asks. She finally takes her weight back into her own legs and gets off Pat, pouting. Chip crumbs continue to shower down. At this point, Pat has given up wiping them off herself.

“It means that I need the rest of you to show up and help out if we want to make anything that sounds like—us,” Pat says pointedly.

Pete is now just pouring the dregs of the Zapp’s bag into her mouth. Chip fragments rain. Pat is disgusted. It’s not like they have a vacuum on this bus. “Let’s make a record that sounds better than us,” Pete says, chewing open-mouthed with shining eyes. “Let’s do everything we’ve ever held ourselves back from. Let’s make something fearless and perfect and  _ true _ .” 

“Uh, okay,” says Pat. “But like. That’s kind of the opposite of rushing into the studio straight off of tour.”

Pete crumples the bag of chips into a tiny ball. She gleams with resolution. Pat doesn’t remember the last time she saw Pete shine quite like this, white flame and steel so hot it flows like a river of gold.

“There’s all kinds of perfect things you can make in nine months, Patricia,” Pete says significantly. “If we’re going to be vulnerable and crazy and brave, I don’t think we should do it slow.”

“Whatever,” says Pat. “Get Jo and Andy to show up and write, and we’ll see about July for studio time, all right?”

And she goes back to ignoring Pete in order to do her work. This is an absolutely essential life skill. Lucky Pat has had so much practice.

 

When they’re hanging out after the show in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white girl with bubblegum pink pigtails grabs the hand of a black girl with a bristly shaved head and drags her up to Pat. They’re both wearing Fall Out Boy shirts, both grinning so hard it looks painful, both looking at Pat like she’s the moon in the sky and the stars too.

“I got my girlfriend because of you,” Bubblegum squeaks. “I saw this picture online of you and Vicky T and I just thought, I gotta ask Tae out.”

Pat knows the picture she means, probably, although Pat doesn’t keep the best tabs on her internet presence these days. There was this one particular moment when some member of the local press asked, _can you speak to the rumors circulating about a lesbian love affair between you and Victoria Asher of Cobra Starship?_ , all in all one of the most hateful and invasive ways such an impolite query could be posed, and Vicky overheard and bounded over to kiss Pat full on the mouth. Pat melted into it, kissing back, and with her eyes closed, flipped the lady off. (For a few years now, they’ve only talked to women journalists. It’s better than talking to men, but not always by a wide margin. Able-bodied cishet white women can be so disappointing.) It wasn’t til she saw it online that Pat realized someone had immortalized the moment in a grainy cell phone picture. Vicky has since printed it out and taped it up in Pat’s bunk. 

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day,” Pat gushes, meaning it. “You guys are so much braver than I was. When I was your age, I was still dating  _ boys _ .”

Bristles wrinkles her nose and it is the cutest thing Pat has ever seen, kittens and babies inclusive. “I might still be too, if Sylvie hadn’t asked me to prom,” she says. “So—you kind of saved me.” 

“Us. You saved us,” Bubblegum hastens to correct, kissing her girlfriend’s cheek. It is so wholesome Pat could die. This is new, for her: the whole time they’ve been a touring band, younger girls have told them how much it means, seeing women take the stage. How healing and safe girls-only spaces can be. How nourishing and welcoming the music scene feels with Fall Out Boy in it. How Pete’s lyrics have changed their lives, how Pat’s melodies inspired them to take up the guitar, how Jo is an all-around fucking hero who makes everyone’s life a better and more glowing place with her fearless attitude, how Andy’s quiet but persistent gender rebellion helped them expand their own horizons and find themselves. How, listening to Pat sing, they learned to believe in themselves. But it’s only in the last few weeks or so, since she and Vicky became  _ official _ , that Pat has gotten this kind of individualized attention. That people have come up to Pat specifically and said,  _ I see you being gay and I am gay too, and you make me feel less alone. You make me understand it is possible for me to exist. You show me what it looks like, to be a queer adult who is in love. You show me a version of me who’s still alive _ . 

Pat knows there are precious few models for that in the world.

The feeling of going out in public with Vicky, holding hands and kissing in front of camera flashes, putting her hand in Vicky’s tight back pocket, Vicky sitting on her lap in mall food courts and feeding her bites of chocolate desserts in restaurants. The feeling of being _ with _ a woman, in public,  _ seen _ . It’s like it smoothes over every edge Pat’s ever had. It’s like her whole life was the gritty clenched-teeth sting of scraped knees, so constant she barely noticed she felt it, and being with Vicky is antiseptic and ointment and bandages, lily-white, pure relief. Respite from an ache so long-term she almost stopped feeling it. Being with Vicky is the opposite of being with Pete. Hiding with Pete. Getting kissed on stage but then denied by Pete.

Pat likes the feeling of being with Vicky so much, she never really has to think about whether it’s  _ Vicky _ she likes, or just the feeling. 

These two girls, glitter on their cheeks and sunshine in their smiles, they ask if they can have a picture with Pat. Pat gets Vicky from the bus and the four of them take one together. “Take one with my phone too,” Pat says impulsively, kissing Vicky’s bare shoulder and feeling a little drunk with the energy of these potential-raw, shining girls. “I want to add it to the collage in my bunk. Queer love for queer lives!”

“Viva la revolución!” cries Bristles. With permission, Pat squeezes the younger girls in a hug. She feels a little bit like a patron saint, gathering up flames for her altar. Pat loves being a lesbian so fucking much. She loves this band, she loves this tour, she loves having the opportunity to live this life, out loud, where kids who need it can see it.

She thinks, Maybe this is how Pete Wentz, poet to the masses, feels all the time. Maybe feeling like this makes the closet, the denial of love, more bearable. Maybe Pete didn’t know Pat couldn’t feel it too.

*

Andy does a blood draw in another city, gets the labs shipped to San Francisco. They know it’s just readouts of levels and charts that get sent, but they keep imagining their bright blood, sloshing cherry-slushie red in little vials, transported in a small blue cooler across the country. Their genetic material, their insides, their guts, it’s all so cheerful when Andy pictures it on the way to San Francisco. Andy thinks of Dr. Rassi reading their blood like tea leaves, pouring it out to interpret the streaks and clots. Andy thinks of their deep-written biological secrets swirling down a medical drain, rejoining the water supply, blood going thinner and thinner til it’s just water again, til like the lesbian mermaid Pete always said they were, that part of Andy returns to the sea.

Andy hasn’t asked  _ the question _ yet, and the blood test is the last step before Dr. Rassi prescribes a pre-op health regimen and sets a date. The blood test is the last step between Andy and the knife. They’re excited but in a way that feels like not breathing, like the tits their body grew without their permission are made of iron, burning heavy like their own branch of the periodic table, crushing their lungs and ribs, searing like blood toxicity. They’re excited but they’re scared, and they haven’t asked.

They have to ask.

Rassi calls and gives the all-clear. “Everything looks great. Your body is healthy, your blood is strong, the muscle already built in your pectoral and shoulder region will support your recovery well. All we need to do is choose your date.”

The first and last time Andy was in Rassi’s office, he drew on their chest with Sharpie. Andy thought there’d be a more official, medical way of doing this, some kind of dry erase marker for the human body, but instead it was like when they were a kid drawing their Xs onto the backs of the hands, drawing intricate swirls up to the elbow and imagining tattoos. Surgery is more punk rock than Andy expected. Rassi drew on their chest like Andy was a children’s activity page,  _ cut along the dotted line _ , and talked through procedure options and nipple sensation. Andy wants this procedure so bad, doesn’t know when again in their life they’ll ever have ten grand in cash. Of course they were too afraid to ask the question, too afraid of having to be the one who said  _ no _ . Andy doesn’t want to wait. Andy wants to live in a body that feels like their own.

Now, on the phone, Andy blurts out, “Did I tell you what I do for a living?” They know they didn’t. “I drum, I’m a drummer, I’m in a band. You might have heard of us, sometimes we’re on the radio?” 

Andy knows how they sound, weird and arrogant, name-dropping for no reason. Their palms are sweaty again. They never thought it would be so hard, being assertive with a medical provider, asking basic questions about a serious surgical procedure they are paying out-of-pocket for. Andy has to be assertive every day just to  _ exist _ in the world, let alone get their pronouns and gender respected. They perform in front of thousands of people every night. They’ve spoken on TV, posed in magazines, done a music video wearing only tuxedo pants and an open vest over a binder. How can they possibly find this receptive, respectful doctor so terrifying?

“Perhaps I have,” Rassi says politely. “What is your band called?”

A burn of frustration fills Andy’s throat. “No, that’s not—” If Andy says another word, they will cry. 

The silence stretches gentle. Andy has never had a doctor who was patient enough for silences before. They focus on breathing, wringing the last drops of air out of quivery lungs, til they feel able to speak. Finally, Andy says, “I’m concerned about how much recovery time I’ll need before I can drum again.”

“I see,” the doctor says. “Of course, it is not a risky procedure, as long as we do not complicate the healing process. If there is internal bleeding or sepsis, it becomes very risky indeed. You will need two weeks bedrest, and longer in a post-op binder to hold the tissue in place for healing. We will monitor your recovery closely, but it may be months before you can drum safely with any kind of vigor.”

The center of Andy drops out, is replaced with a wordless howl. The bus spins. Andy staggers to the nearest bunk and sits down.

“I can’t—I won’t have  _ months _ . We need to put out a record this year. There’s a contract.” 

“Then this is not a good year for top surgery,” Dr. Rassi says. His voice is gentle, but his words make Andy feel like they’ve been pushed off a cliff. They didn’t realize how much they were counting on this. How much hope and relief from dysphoria was tied up in this procedure.

“But the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria is gender-affirming surgery,” Andy says. Their voice sounds dizzy and far away to their own ears.

“I am a medical doctor, Andy. This is my medical advice. If you cannot allow enough time for a safe, healthy recovery, we cannot proceed. I’m sorry.”

Andy has always considered their ability to cry to be one of their strengths. Now, hot tears slicking a face that has only ever disappointed them, they are furious. “I—will consider my options,” Andy manages, around high-pitched gasps and the strangle of tears. “Thank you.”

They hang up numbly, unable to take in whatever else the doctor might say. Sometimes you don’t see how hard you’re leaning on something til it crumbles. For a wild, animal moment, Andy wonders if there isn’t some back alley, coathanger surgeon who will do this without worrying about recovery time. In that moment of madness, they would hack or chew the damn things off themself. Because it’s never just a record: it’s a record and then a tour, and then they’re on the road drumming every night for two years, and then 30 comes and goes and they’re still being dragged to the bottom of the salt sea by the weight of their own flesh, and who knows if they’ll ever have 10 grand again. Andy can’t, Andy just  _ can’t _ , Andy will do anything. Surely there’s an option. Surely there’s a way—!

But the moment passes as quickly as it came. Because of course there is an option. Andy can do the procedure anyway. Even Rassi doesn’t know for sure how long the recovery will be. Maybe if Andy is last in the studio, they’ll have enough time to heal. Maybe if they lay down drum tracking as quickly and perfectly as they always do, it won’t be  _ that _ traumatic for their body. Maybe Fall Out Boy can find another drummer, just in case, just for this. Maybe Andy’s friends are their friends first, coworkers second. Maybe they will understand Andy can’t live this way for a minute longer than necessary—maybe they will understand the choking desperation of one’s own flesh, one’s own creeping skin. 

Andy gives themself a few minutes to finish crying. Then they wipe off their cheeks, pick up their phone, and make the call.

They can’t go back. Only forward.

*

Jo’s on-again, off-again boyfriend meets them in Atlanta to take her out to dinner. Mark takes her to a Korean/soul food fusion place and keeps saying things like, “I can’t wait for you to come home.” Jo has to bite back the rattlesnake urge to snap at him each time. Mark’s not the source of her venom, but he makes a convenient target.

Jo doesn’t want to go home, to Mark or anyone. The brutal, itinerant chaos and chronic crisis of tour, living out of a suitcase and always having shin splints, bruises, and a backache from the combination of bus bunks and stage antics, the smell of other girls and never having the right toiletries, constant crabby swipes at each other, press appearances and endless scrambling to coordinate with venues over the phone, meeting fans in new cities, hearing stories and clasping hands: this  _ is _ her home. This is the place where Jo is most comfortable, most herself, most effective and complete. Tour is her truest life. 

Off tour, Jo is always restless, all her skills and energy turned back in on herself. Off tour is holding her breath, tour is breathing.

Except this tour isn’t like that.

It even started wrong, with Pete’s flight from LA cancelled. They left without her; she met them in the first city. This instead of all four of them, boots fresh off the pavement, waving goodbye to Chicago, leaving together. “It feels weird to kick off a tour without Pete,” Jo said, and Andy squeezed her upper arm, but Pat just shrugged and put in headphones. Like anyone’s supposed to believe even for a second that Pat is fine with all of this, that Pete moving to Los Angeles last year doesn’t bother her at all, like she’s barely involved.

They never gelled after that, either—never found their rhythm. Jo complained plenty, back in the days when Pete and Pat called either other  _ Spitfire _ and  _ Pan _ , when it was like they’d swallowed opposite magnets and couldn’t help but try and lick them out of each other’s throats, when they were so busy writing songs in a preverbal language of eye contact, brushing thighs, and secrets that Jo didn’t know why she even bothered showing up to practice. She never thought she’d miss it. But these days, she barely knows Pete, this livewire girl who will do and say anything as long as there’s a camera. Pat’s buried to the chin in one girlfriend after another. There’s no annoying dynamic between the two because there’s no dynamic at all. They look and speak through one another, mild smiles fixed and unwavering, like they exist on entirely different planes of matter. Two separate dimensions, going on forever in opposite directions, never to intersect. Never to touch. And Andy—

Andy, thank god, is the same they’ve always been. Jo stopped asking herself a few years back if she loves Andy or if she’s  _ in love _ with Andy. She’s almost got herself convinced there’s no difference.

“I’ve been talking to some old friends about a new project,” Jo tells Mark, chopsticking a crispy strip of pork belly. She didn’t intend to say this out loud, hasn’t really even said it to herself yet. But Fall Out Boy doesn’t feel like home right now, and Jo is a girl who needs a home.

“Like a knitting circle?” Mark teases. 

Jo is 10,000% not in the mood. She scowls. “Like a metal band.”

“As in, in addition to the band that’s put out three albums in four years and keeps you touring eighty percent of the year?”

“Four albums in four years, if you count Evening Out,” Jo mutters. No one really counts Evening Out, not even the band, but she’s not in the mood to let things go.

“You know I support you in anything, but…”

“But what?” The tone of Jo’s voice right now, it’s the rattlesnake rattle. Her and Mark haven’t broken up in a while, they’re probably overdue. Jo will eat his heart in the marketplace if he says one wrong word. This is Jo when she’s angry: venom, brass knuckles, lightning conducting sand into molten glass.

Now Mark is frowning too. “Babe, I’m sitting here saying I can’t wait for you to come home, to get off the road. And you’re saying you want to get back on it. You see the disconnect there, right?”

Jo points her chopsticks at Mark, immediately regrets how aggressive the gesture comes out, but proceeds anyway. She’s committed to a course of unpleasant action and she’s never backed down in her life. “I see my boyfriend not supporting my career, is what I see.”

“Oh, is that right?” Mark’s temper is just as close to the surface as Jo’s. Proud and mulish, an outspoken Jew and a loudmouthed Italian, both flexible and calm right up until the moment they are not. “It sounds like you’re gonna see whatever the fuck you want, no matter comes out of my mouth!”

“What’s come out of your mouth tonight?” Jo is all too happy to have an identified person she can fight with, instead of just a pervasive but unspecified wrongness. “Let’s play back the tape. Lots of whiny _come home, Jo_ and _I miss you,_ _Jo_ and _let me stifle and possess you even though your creative heart is crying out for more, Jo_.”

Mark throws his napkin onto the table and raises his palms. “You know what? There’s no point talking to you right now. You’ve convinced yourself of how it is and you’re not gonna listen to me. You’re the only girl in the fucking world who hears  _ I miss  you  _ as a fucking threat to her liberty.” Mark gets up, leans over the table. “I flew to Atlanta to be with you tonight. To support you. To make our relationship work even when you’re on the road. I want to live with you, Jo. Fall asleep next to you and wake up there too. Not fly across the country just to see your face. I’m not trying to stifle you or possess you, I just want to— _ see you _ . I just want to be part of your life.”

Mark’s right about one thing: no matter what he says, Jo refuses to back down. She’s not a bomb to be defused, a madwoman to be de-escalated. She’s a semi-famous guitar player and she’s having a meltdown in this restaurant in Georgia and honestly, there is nothing Mark Goble can do about it.

“This  _ is _ my life, Mark. All the shit you’re complaining about right now? My life. My life  _ how I like it _ . So maybe you need to be really clear with yourself about whether you want to be part of my life, or whether you want to change my life so it fits more conveniently into yours.”

Mark’s mouth opens to throw something back, but he’s out of words. What Jo’s said is actually hitting him, maybe, or else he’s so frustrated bloodflow to the part of his brain that uses reason has stopped.

“I think you were about to storm out dramatically?” Jo prompts. “Well, go for it, dude. I’m not gonna stop you.”

The best/worst part is, watching Mark walk away with his burning red ears and slumped shoulders and grimace of shame? Reaching across the table for his half-finished cocktail because she fucking needs it, Jo  _ does  _ feel a little bit better. It’s nice to remember you exist, sometimes. Even when the way you remember is an impact fracture.

 

Jo feels shaky, rotten, half-sick by the time she gets back to the bus. Her fury has burnt out and all that’s left is lonely-like-drowning. She bangs in the door of the bus and presses her back to it. A big, ugly sob rips out of her before she can suppress it.

If she thought the bus would be empty this close to showtime, she was kidding herself. Pete’s up from the couch and at her side practically before Jo even processes that she’s there.

“Joey, babe, what’s going on?” Pete strokes Jo’s shoulder, her face so open and loving that any chance Jo had of holding it together is fucked. Jo tips forward into Pete and lets herself cry.

“I picked a fight with Mark,” she weeps, which is a big deal, because Jo Trohman almost never admits fault.

“I’ll kill him,” Pete says immediately, loyal and calm. “Do you want me to kill him?”

Jo shakes her head into Pete’s collarbone. She’s soaking Pete’s t-shirt with face fluid, but Pete doesn’t seem to care. Pete rubs her back, sways her softly side to side. “No,” Jo moans. “It’s not about him. It’s the band.”

“Oh, baby. What about the band?”

“I want it to feel like it used to,” Jo bawls. “I want you and Pat to be friends again. I hate always fighting. I want to be kids in a shitty van again.”

Arms wrap around Jo from the other side, strong arms wafting with the fresh clean smell of organic lavender deodorant: Andy. They must have been somewhere on the bus, because Jo’s blocking the only entrance. Unless Andy can phase through solid matter and materialize wherever they are most needed when they have a friend in distress, which honestly, Jo would believe. They have an uncanny knack of always, always being there. Just the fact of Andy’s presence makes Jo feel so safe. Of course this makes the crying worse.

“Let’s buy a van, then,” they say, like it’s that easy. “It’ll be too small for Pete and Pat to avoid each other, so they’ll have to deal with their shit. We all will. We’ll smell bad and bicker like boys and birds in the back, the heat will always be blasting, and no one will trust Pete when it’s her turn at the wheel. Same as old times.”

Pete hums, considering. “I don’t think it will ever be the same as it was,” she says. Jo looks up in time to see Andy scowl at her. “That’s not a bad thing! We’re changing, our band is changing. Now can be just as good, better, as things were then. We just have to find it, okay? Like, we can afford better food than Taco Bell now. There’s so much new that’s good.”

“I like Taco Bell,” Jo starts to say when she’s struck by the door. All three of them look back. Pat cranes her neck through the crack in the bus door.

“Uh, can I come in?”

“We’re crying,” says Pete.

“And promising to spend more time together,” says Andy.

“And hugging a little too hard,” says Jo, wiping her smeary eyes. “Would you like to join us?”

“Fuck yes,” says Pat. So they shuffle-hug away from the door, and Pat gloms on to the huddle of girl love, cocooning Jo in family and warmth.

Pete’s right: it’s not the same, but it still feels good. These girls, these people, this band, these songs, this tour: it’s still home. Jo says it out loud, just to hear it ring true. “You’re still my home.”

After that Jo’s not the only one crying anymore, but it’s a different kind of tears.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the chapter where I really, fully fell in love with these girls in 2008. tell me your wishes and dreams?
> 
> next friday i'll be out of the country and without a laptop, so i'm going to try and post thursday before i go. see you then


	5. the sun throws a shit-eating shine on the moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which vows are spoken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tunes!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Pete is four months pregnant when she gets married. She wishes these were unrelated facts.

She’d say,  _ it’s not how I imagined it _ , and that would be true. But she did used to imagine saying vows in a Cook County courthouse, just as soon as the governor legalized same-sex marriage. There was a girl whose hand she planned to hold on the steps of a Chicago courthouse, pink lips she planned to shyly kiss, a trucker hat she thought she’d push aside instead of a veil.

The location’s right. The circumstances are different. The groom—

Pete’s getting ahead of herself.

They play the last show of the tour in New Orleans. New Orleans is one of those towns where Pete is tangibly, viscerally  _ aware _ of her blackness, where people who look like her mom and grandparents aren’t just present but  _ centered _ . Where the culture is not default whiteness—though there’s plenty of stepping over and around sloppy drunk whiteness on Bourbon Street—but holds the threads of the islands and people Pete, at least in part, came from. Not unlike when she visits family in Jamaica, the atmosphere in New Orleans is black culture and history and pride all tangled up with colonialism and slavery and exploitation. Not unlike parts of Jamaica, in New Orleans black culture is packaged and sold to white tourists who think it’s harmless fun to appropriate things they don’t understand to boost their street cred. The resistance and struggle at the soul of people with brown skin living in a country that thinks of itself as righteously white, now for sale. Now available for ironic social media photos. 

Pete is so aware of herself, in New Orleans. She is aware of walking around with her Caucasian friends, her straightened hair, her skin so light most people just assume she’s white, neutral, unmarked, default. The ways she allows herself to be complicit in that. The way she bleaches herself for the convenience of others. New Orleans holds a deep familiarity, though she’s only been to the city once or twice before. That thing that Pete feels as familiar, her friends would call  _ exotic, other, strange _ . She knows this, at some level, always. She knows it explicitly, clumsily, uncomfortably here tonight.

Speaking of clumsy and uncomfortable: her stomach. She still strips in her box, tonight at their last show, and probably no one’s close enough to really see it, but there is the smallest of bumps. A subtle curve that clings lower to her abdomen than Christmas cookie chub, but crests gentler than the inflamed anger of bad period cramps. It is her baby, her child. Pete can call the bump hers because she knows, now, that it is.

She’s keeping it, whoever it turns out to be.

She finally tells him the night before they close out the tour. Tour is Never-neverland: she feels like she’ll never grow up, that maybe if they keep adding cities she’ll never have to. Time will never catch up to her. Tour isn’t like real life. It’s realer than that. On tour there are no consequences. Except now it’s ending, and the thing growing inside of her is developed enough to have a liver that produces bile. For six weeks, now, there has been a heartbeat. Sometimes she feels it, quivering like a sparrow with a needle in its breast, inside of her. 

So Pete calls the baby’s father.

She tells him she’s pregnant, just spits out the words before she can doubt herself, and Ash says,  _ are you sure _ . Yes, says Pete. And without hesitation, without judgment, with his kind straightforward voice, Ash says,  _ what do you want to do? _

What she loves most about him is that he’s never forced her. Everything’s always been up to her.

Maybe that’s why she says it. Maybe it’s the power of saying something out loud that scared her so much and having him just… accept it, without a ripple or a wave. She hears his imperturbable voice on the other end of the line, so unchanging, so beloved, this boy she’s somehow been dating for nearly a year, say _ what do you want to do _ , and Pete loves him more sharply and deeply than ever before. Maybe that’s why.

Or maybe she means it. Maybe a family is all she’s ever really wanted, the thing she’s been looking for in every flashbulb, every microphone, the gloss of every magazine. Maybe investing in healing, becoming a girl and not just a series of open wounds, learning how to exist in the world without it hurting so fucking much—maybe she’s a little in love with that idea. The same way she falls in love with anything that’s new. The same way she has never quite managed to love herself.

(That just means she has extra love leftover for everyone else. To pour into a child. Right? That’s how love works? If you spill over with enough of it, it forms the thick sticky webs of a family? The gold-and-glass rim of a snowglobe, with everything you need to survive trapped so happily inside? The problem with Pete’s love is just that she has extra, and if she wants to stop looking at Pat this way, she just needs to find something else to do with it?)

Whatever the reason or the root, Pete opens her mouth and says, “I want to marry you. I want to be a family.”

And on the other end of the phone line, the country, her heart, Ash Simpson begins to cry.

So on the last night of the Infinity on High tour, Pete says onstage into her mic, “Guys—and I’m sorry but I’m from Chicago, I just default to calling everyone  _ guys _ , let me know if it’s a problem for you, really—guys, sharing this tour with you is the best part of my life. Every show, every night, every city, every crowd. Like Van Gogh said: life seems almost enchanted after all. Being on the road with my best friends—just. Thank you so much. Wow.” Over the years, Pete has developed a natural patter, learned how and when to pause for the cheering to die down. It used to surprise her, the things fans would scream at. Now she knows the pitch and catch of their collective breath by heart. “There’s something else I want to share with you tonight. Um, my band doesn’t even know this yet.” She takes a big, underwater-swimming type of breath and says, “I got engaged last night.”

Pete keeps her eyes fixed on the crowd, her mouth fixed in a grin. No matter what, she must not look at her friends. She will turn into a pillar of salt or a snake or a stone if she meets Pat’s eyes. She kneels down to high-five some of the shrieking girls in front. She presses palms, beaming with all sincerity. She loves these kids, each of them, unconditionally. They light her up. For a long time, they are how and why she’s stayed alive.

“Holy shit,” Pat says clearly into her mic. Jo says, “Uh, congratulations?”

“I know I write about heartbreak a lot,” Pete forges ahead. “Tonight’s not about that. Tonight is about finding the one thing worth holding onto. Tonight is about love that lasts forever, and nothing bad ever happening again, and not knowing when to quit, and forgetting how to die. I know that’s not the rest of the world. But it can be us, here, tonight. New Orleans—tonight let’s be alive!”

She ends shouting, the crowd screaming back, an echo outside of her to match the faint double heartbeat within. Cupped in the perfect pulse of this moment, Pete believes every word she’s said. Doesn’t she always?

 

They have a hotel that night, a big bed for each of them, two rooms and two bathtubs. All four of them are giggling like they’re at a high school sleepover. Everything feels easy, liquid, warm. Pat and Jo pass a bottle of champagne back and forth. Andy waltzes around the room with an imaginary princess, singing. 

Pete’s taking her turn in the bathtub, enjoying the feeling of being full-body clean for the first time in months and worrying only a little about cooking her baby like ramen, when there’s a soft knock. From the other side of the door Pat asks, “Can I come in?”

That alone is so unusual: a knock, a request, after years of barging in, pissing and shitting in front of each other, interrupting showers and leaving stained panties to soak in the sink, the four of them a gaggle of too-close sisters who overshared everything, who had forgotten the word for embarrassment.

“Of course,” Pete says, though actually what she’s thinking is that she hopes she still looks thin enough to be sexy in this bathtub. Pat’s seen her naked plenty since they broke up—everyone’s seen Pete naked plenty—but she feels shy about the way her body has begun to stretch and change. It would be a good moment for obscuring bubbles, but the water is eucalyptus-scented and clear.

She expects Pat to brush her teeth or something, but instead she comes and sits on the edge of the tub. She swirls her fingertips in the water and it’s intimate in a sudden, clutching way that catches Pete’s breath. Pete feels her vulnerability like an ache, doesn’t know if she feels pulled to hide herself or go belly-up and bare all. Pat’s chin-length hair is still wet, dripping on the shoulders of the shirt she sleeps in. She watches her fingers comb through the water and does not look at Pete.

“So. Engaged to be married,” she says.

Experimentally, Pete sinks lower into the water, letting it half-fill the hollows of her ears. Pat’s voice reverberates through the the water, vibrating up against and inside of Pete. In an emergency, Pete is prepared to drown herself. She flashes her ringless hand in Pat’s line of sight and tries to make her voice come out light. “Yep. Happened over the phone, just like a storybook.”

Pat looks up suddenly and meets Pete’s eyes, and it’s worse. Pat’s sclera are just slightly red, her lower lids just barely puffy. She smells like Jo’s weed, but Pete’s pretty sure the swell is from crying. “It’s not how I imagined,” Pat says in a rush.

“Me neither.”

“I—I’ll be there,” Pat says. “Always. For you, with you. You know that?”

Pete splashes her, just a little, a rush of warm water darkening the fabric stretched over Pat’s thigh. “Of course I know. I want you to be.”

“Good,” Pat says, like that settles it. Her shoulders straighten, her face brightens. “So are you gonna ask me to be your best man, or does your sister get to do it?”

“You, definitely you.” Pete doesn’t even have to think about it. “Unless that’s weird.”

“‘Course it’s weird,” says Pat. “But—it’s us.”

“I wish I had clothes on for this, but, um—there’s something else I should tell you, before you find out from a gossip magazine.”

“You mean that you’re pregnant?”

“I—what? Wait. How?” Pete sputters. “Did Andy—?”

“No. You, um—your box of tampons has been full all tour. No purple wrappers in the trash, no monthly demands I make you hot chocolate with cayenne. I don’t even remember the last time I saw you sobbing at Star Wars. And—your pants don’t quite fit, do they? You’ve got this tiny—pooch.” Pete claps her hands to her belly under the water and Pat laughs, touching her arm to stop her. “No, no, it’s good. You’ve always been too skinny. I just—and your tits, Pete. They’re getting bigger. I notice, okay? And I put the pieces together.”  

Pete seizes on the most relevant piece of information presented and says, “You’ve been checking out my titties.”

“And you told Andy you were preggo and not me,” Pat counters.

Pete grins like the Cheshire cat and slides the rest of the way underwater. She blinks, air bubbles in her eyelashes, and looks into Pat’s calm ocean eyes. The only way Pete would feel  _ totally _ safe from losing her mind, kissing Pat Stump on the mouth, and dragging her into this bathtub to debauch her was if there was an actual ocean between them, but for now, a few inches of bathwater will have to do.

Smiling, ignorant to her peril, voice muted and distorted by the water in Pete’s ears, Pat says, “Now you gotta tell Jo. Last to know? She’ll be pissed.”

Pete is safe and warm and submerged, an egg in a mermaid’s purse, waiting to swim out as a shark whenever she’s ready. She holds her breath and feels her baby beat within her. She looks up at Pat and fears nothing, nothing but love.

*

A girl is like a grenade. Pull a pin and watch her blow, flying apart in every direction. Andy knows it better than most: they were born a girl, then deconstructed.

A week after tour ends, they are brushing out Pete’s hair and pinning scarlet roses in it. They can’t really believe that they made it, these two creatures shaped like women who are really just broken glass. That was always the secret of Andy and Pete, what bonded them like invisible glue, what stitched them up with shifting filaments of sour thread: no matter how they looked on the outside, they weren’t whole, weren’t right, weren’t gonna make it. The quiet background conviction that there was no life after survival. Andy doesn’t know how they’ll fit in Pete’s life, now that Pete’s found a place where she fits. If Pete’s getting married, she really must have lived to adulthood—against all odds, grown up.

So what the fuck is Andy supposed to do?

Andy doesn’t say any of this out loud. Instead, they do Pete’s hair, the same as any other time, any other day. Andy is content to let the magnitude of this day go unspoken, ‘cause they don’t know what they’ll do if they have to hear the words out loud. Pete meets their eyes in the mirror, shows a small and worried smile. Andy’s worried too, can offer very little comfort. They clasp Pete’s shoulder, fingers curling around Pete’s bared collarbone, and say as seriously as possible, “May the Force be with you.”

Pete’s face cracks into a real smile under the careful magazine-cover makeup. There are no photographers here today, no press and not even a Polaroid camera, but that’s no reason not to look spectacular. Pete brought in one of her favorite music video makeup artists to paint her face, so that instead of her signature dark smoke and too-much liner, her eyelids are burnished bright like metal with the edges framed in dramatic dark. Her eyeliner wings are thin and sweeping, her brows tamed into perfect forms. She looks both less and more than usual. (“I’ll look like a Hot Topic employee if I do my makeup myself,” Pete said. “A  _ flawless _ Hot Topic employee,” said Jo. “A freelance clown,” Pete insisted.) Her dress is perfect: a high tight waist, the skirt full to her knee in 1950s angles, the sleeves ending just below the elbow so that the bright red and orange splashes of floral-on-white transitions into the living pattern of Pete’s tattoos. She’s wearing peep toe heels the exact color of the roses in her hair, of her lipstick. Her smile is an open wound. She glitters white, vital, beautiful _.  _ She has diamonds all up her earlobes but no other jewelry, save her necklace of inked thorns framed by a sweetheart neckline.

This wedding is to happen off the record, quick and private, the courthouse and then Pete’s parents’ backyard, one moment of Pete’s life that is just for her. Her marriage to Ash Simpson, himself a well-known pop star, will start sacred and secret in a way her life, body, mental health, and relationships are not. Witnessed solely by friends and family, recorded only in memory, proven only by rings exchanged and certificate signed. Andy can’t decide if they think it’s beautiful or sad, that Pete’s most special moment is not to be captured, that film can’t be trusted to stay faithful. But then, it’s Pete: so probably it’s both. Whenever there are two options, Pete Wentz is both.

Andy’s just pinned the final rose into Pete’s complicated hair, the effect of scarlet and black like a throbbing crown, when Jo comes skidding into the room, her cheeks flushed the same color as her dress. She looks lovely and a little drunk. 

“Pete, you look so  _ pretty _ ,” Jo exclaims, looking at Pete’s reflection in the mirror, and immediately starts crying. It is the fourth time in the last two hours that Jo has cried her mascara off. Andy has been to a few weddings with Jo, and it’s always like this: nonstop waterworks. Jo’s hair has been curled and pinned back off her neck, a few ringlets hanging like she’s a Disney princess, and her dress is peach to complement some of the more subtle colors of Pete’s gown. Andy thinks of asking her to dance later tonight, in the soft May chill of the Wentz’s backyard, and feels something tug in their belly.

“You really do,” comes a soft voice from the doorway. There, looking serious and sweet in a tailored grey suit, is Pat. She is looking at Pete like Pete is the candle on an altar, like Pete is the flame in her breast. Crumpled in her hand is a grey knit beanie that Andy knows she’s brought to put on if she gets overwhelmed. It’s not a fancy dress hat—and Pat definitely owns some of those—because it’s the first hat. The one Pete gave her, seven years ago now, for the first show they ever played. 

Pat is looking at Pete the exact same way she’s always looked at her. Like she loves her more than any other thing in the world.

And they really just can’t have that. Pete starts to turn in her chair, to face Pat properly, and Andy puts their body in between the pair. They don’t know why they do it, just that Pete can’t see Pat looking at her like that, Pat can’t see how Pete looks back. They don’t know, and then they do: because Pete is getting married today. Pete wants a family, a white picket fence, a chance. A real chance. Pete wants a  _ life _ , an adult life, to be a spouse and a parent, a wife and a mother, and this is the one thing that Andy knows for sure will keep her oldest friend alive. 

Andy needs Pete alive.

It’s Pete’s wedding day, but Andy’s thinking about when Pete tried to die a few years ago, when they got the call that the girl who pulled them back from every edge was alone in a hospital bed and hadn’t even called. Andy’s thinking about when Pete and Pat finally split up and Pete moved to LA, when Pete was drunk on the glossy pages of every gossip mag with her hands up the skirts of every hot-item starlet, when Pete became a living demonstration of all the ways a person can get lost. Andy’s thinking about when Pete started hitting the benzodiazepines harder and harder, leaving Andy slurred voicemails and declining return calls. Andy’s thinking about how relieved they felt when Pete found out she was pregnant, because Pete takes life seriously and so she sobered up—

It is Pete’s wedding day and Andy is thinking about a lot of things. Andy is thinking about how Pete has been scaring them for a long time. Andy needs Pete healthy, happy, hopeful, and Andy needs it for both of them. 

Andy won’t let Pete throw this perfect, golden chance away on the look they see on Pat’s face.

So they put themself between and before two of their closest friends, and they do it because they believe love can be true at the same time it’s poisonous. Fated lovers don’t actually have the best track record in the stories do they? In fact, they seem to die a lot.

“Pat! Just the woman I wanted to see. I had a question about the vows,” Andy bullshits. They catch Pat by the arm and sweep her out of the room, talking too fast to allow Pat to get a word in edgewise. All they have to do is keep Pat busy til the ceremony, they think. Once Pete is officially, legally, eternally married, all the weirdness and significant looks and tension will surely dissipate. Nothing will ever be quite so complicated as wanting the best for your friends and knowing it’s not each other. Andy is doing the right thing.

Aren’t they?

*

Jo knows you’re supposed to say  _ the ceremony was so beautiful _ after weddings. But this one felt pretty perfunctory. Their group filed into the unglamorous courtroom while another left, the parts were read and words were said, and then they all filed out again. The most exciting moment was when Pat grabbed Jo’s hand and tried to crush all the bones in it, her face perfectly smooth but the tendons in her neck popping like she was being stabbed. Jo tipped forward, rested her chin on Pat’s shoulder from behind, and braced herself to take Pat’s weight should her friend topple when Pete said the words  _ I do _ .

(Pat doesn’t, by the way. Topple. Pete says the words, binds herself, and no planets explode, no worlds end, the Death Star does not destroy Alderaan. In the end, it really is only a wedding. Pete really is only a girl.)

So why does Jo feel like something irreversible has been set in motion? Like Pete,  _ impregnante _ and now wed, means something about the band. Like they’ll never be four tired kids in a broken-down van again, like they’ll never be young and unattached enough to live without responsibilities and obligations. Like everything is different now, like everything she’s ever counted on is going to change.

Jo uses the landline at Pete’s parents’ to call her friend Scott Ian. He doesn’t pick up, but she leaves a message. She says, “I changed my mind. Let’s do the band.”

Then she grabs three flutes of champagne, only one of which she’s planning on giving to Patricia, and heads for the dance floor. She doesn’t want to have another thought again for the rest of the night, and she applies herself seriously to realizing this dream.

*

Vicky didn’t come to the wedding. Vicky didn’t come to the wedding because Pat didn’t ask her to.

She would have. She would have wanted to. She likes Pete, everybody from the bands Pete’s signed likes her. It’s not like a typical label relationship, people with money acquiring and selling someone else’s capacity to make songs; it’s more like pledging artists to a cause they all believe in. It’s like one of the indie punk labels out in East Bay, except focused on elevating women musicians in an environment sheltered from a misogynistic industry. It’s not like Island, not like L.A.: it’s the kind of belonging only Pete Wentz can conjure. Of course all her artists adore her.

Which is a long way of saying, when Vicky finds out about this? That Pat attended the wedding of someone Victoria considers a friend, the wedding of her ex-girlfriend and best friend, alone? She’s gonna be pissed.

(Pat nurses the hope that maybe Vicky just won’t find out, til she literally runs into Gabby Saporta at the reception. They spill wine on each other from the force of the collision. Gabby Saporta, also known as the frontwoman of Vicky’s band. Yeah. Vicky finding out is inevitable like a meteor headed for earth.)

So why didn’t Pat ask her? Didn’t Pat want her here? Did Pat think something was going to happen—that at the last second, pregnant Pete would peel away from the arm of her groom, from the man she loves enough to pledge herself to, out loud and in front of witnesses, and fly to Pat instead? Did Pat think she would want Pete back under these circumstances, under any circumstances?

Did Pat think she could ever really detox and get clean? Did Pat think she could ever stop loving this girl? Did Pat think she could ever live a life where Pete Wentz wasn’t her bones and her blood and her dumb fucking heart?

And if she  _ didn’t _ think that, what the fuck is she doing with Vicky?

Pat is drunk. Pat has danced with Jo and Andy so hard that the whole backyard has become a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, one of those sinister spinning rides that only speeds up and up and up til centrifugal force grabs you by the throat and your heart mashes itself against your ribs. (Good, she’s sick of having one.) Pat’s got Pete Wentz’s hat in her pocket and doesn’t understand why she thought she could make it through this wedding intact. Pat is standing by a bush with a bottle of incredibly unappealing water, staring off into the middle distance in a manner she hopes is winsome. In reality, she’s got this bush on standby in case she needs to hurl.

That’s where the newly married, blond and beaming, cheekbones and slim wrists, broad-shouldered, fine fucking specimen of a Los Angeles man, insufferable Ash Simpson finds her.

“Congratulations,” Pat tells him. The word comes out smushier than intended. “You got the girl.”

Ash smiles in that easy, natural way that rubs against Pat’s skin like barbed wire. This guy wouldn’t last one day as a girl. Wouldn’t last one minute. This guy will never understand Pete like Pat does. Pat liked him well enough, for an ex’s new beau, til today. She likes him less than ever in this moment. Oblivious, he slings a friendly arm over Pat’s shoulder, joins her in gazing off into the middle distance, does not notice that her skin attempts to shrug off her body like a discarded suit coat in response to his touch.

“Pat, why aren’t we friends?” Ash asks. He sounds drunk on his own luck, beautiful and content and gilded in all the ways Pat is only pretending to be. 

“You mean aside from the obvious?”

Ash’s charmed face creases into a frown. “No, that’s what I’m asking. What’s so obvious? Why don’t we know each other, and why does everyone act like that’s just a fact of life? No one’s more important to Pete than you.”

Pat slits her eyes. “Except you,” she says. “Which is the obvious.” What’s more unbelievable—that Ash is asking her this, or that she’s surprised?  

Ash flaps his hand in what he probably thinks is a helpful way. His eyes gleam with anguish that appears to be sincere. “But that’s  _ different _ ,” he insists. “I’m Pete’s husband, her partner, her—her  _ you know _ . Lover. You’re her  _ best friend _ . We’re in totally different categories.”

“ _ Are _ we?”

“Of course!” Ash is so eager to explain the distinction to her. If she waits long enough, Pat just knows something shitty will come out of his mouth. They’re the same age on a calendar, but Ash has been a handsome cishet white guy his whole life, so in every way that counts, Pat is older. Decades and eons older. In this moment she feels it. “Like, people who see you with your clothes off in changing rooms are not the same as people who see you with your clothes off for sex, you know? You get to have a favorite from each category.”

“You mean like, romantic and platonic?” Pat’s drunker than she’s been in a long time, Pat can taste bile on the back of her tongue, Pat is assuredly not having the best day of her life, but she can still do better than changing room metaphors. 

“Yes! Exactly! You and Pete love each other in a platonic way. You’re her favorite platonic person, and I’m the father of her baby. You and me, we’re not in competition!”

And that’s when Pat realizes Ash isn’t being cruel, not deliberately. It’s that he doesn’t even know she and Pete ever dated.

Inside of her, a small but enduring structure crumbles at last, collapsing into the sea of her roiling acid guts. Pat can feel her own stomach chewing on itself. She can’t tell if she wants to scream or fertilize this bush with half-digested appetizers, but either way, something is clawing at her throat and Pat feels like erupting.

She opens her mouth and they’re all surprised, Ash and Pat and her stomach too, when what comes out is a giant hiccup of a sob. How can anyone exist who doesn’t know they were in love? Pat’s chest is being torn in two. She tries to breathe and another ugly sob rips out of her. It’s like, not only did Pete refuse to make their relationship public, she had to erase it too. She had to make it invisible. She had to make it so secret it was the same as  _ doesn’t exist _ . Now everything they ever were to each other is a rumor on the messageboards, a handful of fading photographs, the plausible deniability of stage antics. Pete made their love a fucking cryptid. 

Then she married someone who doesn’t even know what Pat ever meant to her.

“Sometimes, when you’re a lesbian? You use the same changing room as the people you fuck,” Pat half-yells, half-bawls in Ash’s direction. God, she wishes she could yak on his shoes right now. But all that’s coming out is tears.

“W-what is even happening?” stammers Ash. He hovers, not coming near enough to  offer comfort, correctly assessing that Pat will straight fucking bite his hands off if he touches her with them right now.  

“And  _ that’s  _ why we’re not friends!” she yells. She throws Pete’s hat at his feet, since apparently the vomit train is not making any stops at this particular station, and runs away from Pete’s man, from Pete’s wedding, from Pete’s version of Pat’s life.

 


	6. try to stay afloat in shallow water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pat tries her hardest to fall in & out of love, bisexuals exist, and Pete takes her clothes off without anyone asking her to (again).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI DUDES! I just got back from Europe and am super jetlagged and haven't been on the internet in 7 days. I missed you all and I hope this chapter hurts less than the last one did, even though I know it doesn't.
> 
> [at least like all great heartbreaks, this one has a soundtrack?](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

“Jo, why isn’t Pat returning my calls?”

“Why am I the person you’re asking?” Jo scoops pad thai into her mouth and chews into the phone. “I feel like I have less information than anyone, given that I am not actually part of this situation.”

Pete exhales loudly in frustration. “Because you’re in  _ Chicago _ , Josephine. Where Pat is. And I’d just ask her directly but, as previously stated,  _ she won’t return my fucking calls _ .”

“Have you tried asking yourself?” Jo slurps a noodle, worries not at all about being polite to Pete Wentz. She has not worried about being polite to Pete Wentz in a long, long time.

“Myself.”

“Yeah. Like, turn your gaze inward and ask,  _ Pete, self, is there any reason you can think of that Pat might not want to talk to you _ ?”

“So you think she’s avoiding me on purpose? Did she say something to you about it? Tell me every word she said, Jo. Do it or I’ll start crying. I cried yesterday because I forgot to ask for mustard on a burger. This is not an idle threat. Are you gonna make a pregnant woman cry?”

Jo shovels in an extra-large bite and takes her time chewing. “I’m not your life manager,” she points out. “I’m just your band manager. Like, we’re off tour, you’re on the other side of the country, this isn’t really my problem right now.”

“Oh, so would you like me to just fester in this til we get together in person to record? Is that your preference? That I deal with it then, while we’re paying for studio time, and you are there  _ in vivo _ and can’t escape?”

Jo groans, drawing it out for maximum dramatic effect, and shoves her food away. Suddenly she’s lost her appetite. “ _ Fine _ ,” she concedes. “No, Pat hasn’t said anything to me. I’ve only seen her once or twice since tour ended, dude. I’m kind of saturated after living with you all for almost three months.”

“Really? I started missing you guys as soon as I got off the plane. And you know I don’t have a lot of social energy, it’s just… I feel right when I’m around you. Something is always ever-so-slightly off when we’re apart.” Pete’s voice is soft with all the ways she’s easy to love.

“God, being pregnant  _ does _ make you emotional,” says Jo, because otherwise  _ she  _ might start crying.

“Told you. I’m a live grenade,” Pete murmurs. “So, okay. Reasons Pat might not want to talk to me. Um. Because I’m too much all the time. Because sometimes I annoy her for sport. Because she might be  _ saturated _ and want some alone time. Because she’s too busy screwing Vicky T. Because she’s writing brilliant demos for our new record. Because I’m trying to pressure her into the studio before this baby pops out of me ‘cuz it’s the only way we’ll meet our deadline for Island, and she’s a goddamn perfectionist, and it’s probably stressing her out.”

Actually, Jo needs more sustenance to get through this conversation. She spears a dumpling and tears into it ruthlessly with her teeth. “Good, that’s a great list! But I wonder if maybe there’s something kind of obvious you’re missing?”

Pete is quiet for a long beat. Jo chews and swallows her dumpling, wishing it tasted like anything at all.

“I don’t want it to be that.” When Pete finally speaks, her voice comes across the line so small, sad, and girlish that Jo wants to get on the next plane to Los Angeles just to sit beside her on a couch, their legs bumping together, and see who gets weirder cravings: the pregnant girl or the stoned one.

“Babe? There’s a good chance it’s that.” Jo is as gentle as she knows how to be. “It’s not even been a month since you told her you were preggo and engaged, let alone since she stood next to you and watched you get married. She might need some time to get used to that.”

Jo doesn’t say,  _ on your wedding night you swung shining in Ash’s arms and stared at him like he was your whole world. On your wedding night you made a vow to try and make a good, loving, picture-perfect storybook life without her. It’s not the kind of storybook where the princess and the dragon run away together, it’s the kind where the girl’s dead til she feels the lips of her prince, and she shrugs off the comforting chill of the grave and lives heteronormatively ever after. It’s the kind where your time with Pat was the  _ before _ and everything else is the  _ ever after.  _ On your wedding night Pat got so drunk she threw up in my bathtub all night, sobbing that now things are really over, and I left early to take care of her and you didn’t notice either of us were gone because you’re so damn happy, and she doesn’t even resent you for it, because happy is what she wants you to be. _

Pete says, “We aren’t supposed to be that kind of exes.”

“I know, honey,” Jo says. At this point she’s just poking at her noodles and dumplings.

“I’ll always love her more than anyone else. I—she’ll always be my soul. Doesn’t she know that?”

“Um. It’s possible… that knowing... might make it... worse?” 

Pete’s voice goes crumbly with the tears she promised. “Oh,” she says.

Jo feels a clench of guilt, like she’s the one who created this situation. This is why she didn’t want to get involved. In a burst of attempted comfort, she spits lies as fast as she can spin them. “But I mean, hello, I’m not Pat, I don’t know what she’s thinking or feeling. I haven’t even really seen her since tour ended. I could be totally full of shit, it could be any of your reasons! Like, those were good reasons. We won’t know for sure til she gets back to you. Um, it could be—it could be nothing. I’m sure she’ll call you soon.”

_ On your wedding night I spent 45 minutes trying to wash the vomit out of Pat’s clothes and hair _ .  _ I let her sleep in my bed with me, but god, she smelled terrible. Her crying kept us both up til sunrise. _

Pete’s tears, though: these ones ebb. “Yeah? Do you think so?” she asks in a watery voice.

“Of course,” Jo says with certainty she does not even remotely feel. “She loves you.”

_ After your wedding night Pat had a hangover for two days. We watched cooking shows together, lived on Doritos and cheap beer, got high. We turned off our phones and turned our backs on the world. That’s the last time I saw her: when I took care of the ruins of her heart. Now she’s avoiding us both, and I don’t blame her. _

“Thanks, Jo,” Pete sniffles. “You know you’re my favorite human, right?”

“I mean, that’s why you’re naming your kid after me, isn’t it?”

“Trohmania Wentz,” Pete says, her voice warming with the potential of a laugh. “It’s got such a nice ring to it.”

“Perfect for all genders!” Finally, Jo feels up to the task of approaching her food again. She doesn’t want to think about what kind of voicemails this version of Pete has probably been leaving on Pat’s phone, so she thinks about dumplings instead.

They chat idly for a while after that, Jo eating happily, Pete daydreaming about what she wants to do with the new record, both of them losing their shit when Pete thinks she feels the baby move for the first time and it turns out to be a fart. It’s the good part of being Pete-and-Jo, of being girls in a band who love each other. It feels exactly the same as it always does.

*

Matt drives them to the airport.

Andy didn’t plan on telling anyone they were doing this, not before they emerged from their chrysalis  four pounds and a whole lot of dysphoria lighter, and maybe not after. No reason to concern their bandmates, no reason to make anyone think they’re not equipped to drum. Andy didn’t plan on telling anyone til Dr. Rassi said, “I won’t book the OR until you can put me on the phone with at least one person who can stay in your house with you and support your early recovery.” Andy protested, and Rassi said, “Normally I don’t need to tell patients this quite so many times, but Andy, if you’re just going to endanger yourself, I can’t do the procedure at all.”

So Andy told Matt, anarchist housemate and old friend, and Matt talked to Dr. Rassi, and today Andy is flying to San Francisco to get cut.

“You’ll call when you’re out of surgery?” Matt asks for the seven hundredth time. “You’re sure you don’t want me to come with? I checked this morning, there’s still seats on your flight—”

Andy laughs, touching Matt’s shoulder before they get out of the car at passenger drop-off. “I’m gonna be okay, Mixon. I’ll be back in a week. You can fuss over me then.”

Matt looks unconvinced, which is how he’s looked all week, since Andy told him. He supports their decisions and didn’t make a single gross comment about boobs, it’s just that he doesn’t trust them to take care of their own health. Andy is starting to feel like Pete. 

“Okay, but give me your friend’s address again? So I know where you’re staying?”

“Just trust me,” they tell Matt. “I’m taking this even more seriously than you are. Now let me go.”

“You call and I’m there!” Matt insists. “One phone call, I mean it.”

Andy feels lucky in their choice of friends, really. They will feel even luckier when all this scrutiny and  hovering ends. They extricate themself from Matt’s concern before he makes them miss their flight, and in what seems like no time at all after so many years of waiting, they’re in the air, they’re soaring, they’re rushing into their future.

On the plane they think about the lie they told Matt and Dr. Rassi. They said they were staying with a friend in California til they were healed enough to fly home to Milwaukee. They assured everyone they’d have constant supervision and care. But Andy doesn’t trust anyone with this, with standing over them while they sleep or changing the dressing under their medical binder. They can do it on their own. They’re staying in a hotel and a home nurse is coming once a day. It will be enough. There won’t be any complications, Andy won’t allow it. The procedure will go smoothly and the recovery will be record-setting quick. It just—it has to be. Andy just needs this one fucking thing to go right.

By the time they debark in sunny California, Andy doesn’t feel guilty about lying anymore. They know what’s best for them, and they have the same right to make stupid decisions as anyone else. They check the time on their phone, see they have just under two hours to make their way to the hospital. They’re starving, haven’t eaten in 20 hours on doctor’s orders, and all they’re thinking about is the vegan food they’re getting delivered to their hotel room after this. Heaps of it. Wheelbarrows, even. Their delivery driver will need a pick-up truck to accommodate all the vegan food Andy is going to devour. That’s what they’re gonna do for a week: lay on their back, change bandages and drain wounds, watch premium cable, and shovel vegan food into their face backhoe-style. If that’s not the optimal surgery recovery environment, Andy doesn’t know what is.

Preoccupied with food fantasies, Andy almost doesn’t notice their name on a placard in the ground transportation area of SFO. Out of the corner of their eye they see the text  _ ANDY HURLEY _ , and at the same moment a familiar voice calls, “Over here, dumbass.”

Andy whirls around so fast their suitcase jumps off its wheels. Leaning against a potted plant with a sign in front of her slightly swollen belly is none other than Pete Wentz.

“What—how—what are you doing here?” Andy sputters.

Pete raises one of her heavy eyebrows. “Unlike some of us, I actually live in this state? So it’s slightly more peculiar that you’re here, I think.”

Andy pulls their suitcase in front of them and clasps both their hands on the extendable handle. They have nothing to say.

But some friends see you clearly enough that you don’t need language. Pete tucks the sign under her arm, walks over to Andy, kisses her friend on the cheek, and pries the suitcase out of their hands. “You are a terrible liar with friends who love you very much,” Pete tells them. “Matt called me, dude. You’re staying with me and Ash. I’m going to take care of you.” 

Pete starts rolling their suitcase towards the doors, leading them to the parking garage. Andy’s frozen to the airport tile, has forgotten how to move. “C’mon, dummy. Are you  _ really _ gonna make a pregnant lady carry your bag?”

“You took it out of my hands!” Andy protests. Their body unlocks and they’re able to trot after Pete. “That’s not on me, chica! Hey, slow down if you’re so pregnant.”

By the time they’re at Pete’s car, things feel so normal it’s like Andy had planned to stay with Pete from the start. Pete doesn’t lecture them for secret-keeping or scold them for being reckless, and Andy doesn’t thank her. Andy just quietly, privately radiates with the warmth of Pete’s care, with the feeling of having a family and being loved. They keep forgetting they don’t have to do things on their own anymore. They’re glad they have people like Pete to remind them.

*

Some things you love with the loss built in.

With Pete it was never like that.

Pete isn’t— Pete wasn’t—

For Pat, anyway, it was never like that. Pat loved Pete with the tags cut off, the factory seal broken, no training wheels or safety net or parachute. She dove in headfirst and never worried about hitting bottom, never planned for putting herself back together. Every problem they had, every fight—falling out of love was never one of the stakes. Whatever they argued about, it wasn’t endings. Pat knew in her heart she’d never break up with Pete, right up until she did it. She loved Pete like freefall. She loved Pete like flying. Or: she loved Pete like there’s no difference between falling and flying, not til the very last second, and she thought their hourglass would never run out.

Of course it’s hard for her to believe she’s living, now, in the aftermath. Life after Pete. She’s living on a side of the earth she never believed existed. Where she thought there was a void, instead she finds… the rest of her life. Apparently. And maybe, when they first split up, when Pete left for Los Angeles and started making headlines, maybe that was just about surviving. Maybe Pat forgot there was anything greater than base survival to strive for. Maybe there was no point at all where Pat thought to herself, this is really, truly, forever and ever  _ over _ .

Pat fell asleep last night in love with Pete and woke up this morning the same way. She doesn’t have an exit strategy for her heart. It’s a feeling she’s lived with for so long she forgot to notice it, til Pete got married and Pat stood beside her, on the wrong side of her, and the feeling grew barbs. Til Pat realized scraping out survival isn’t enough anymore. Isn’t living. That in the wasteland of after-Pete, she truly has to make a life. That there’s no returning.

That after everything they’ve been through, time still only ever moves in the one direction.

“Daydream much?” Vicky knocks Pat back into the present, plunking a plate down in front of her. She’s smashed a tube of cinnamon rolls into a wafflemaker and drizzled icing over the top. Pat feels the familiar old tug of  _ shouldn’t eat it _ tangling up with  _ delicious I want it _ .

“Vee, these smell amazing,” Pat says. She crams too much enthusiasm into her voice, maybe overcompensating for thoughts that can only be described as ‘a bummer,’ and Vicky gives her a weird look.

“I told you, food that comes out of a tube is my specialty,” she says. She sits down next to Pat at the counter and stabs a fork into the oozing pile of cinnamon pastry she’s created. Pat watches this sweet, sexy, funny woman, this person who is her girlfriend, this girlfriend she’s in New York to see, eat with uncomplicated gusto.

Away from the rush and hustle of tour, there is too much time. For two months they waxed wistful about all the things they’d do together, if they could step outside of time and away from interruptions, and now here they are, all the time in the world and not one responsibility between them, and Pat has no idea what to do. It’d be one thing if they were going to lock themselves in Vicky’s bedroom and fuck for a week straight, but it’s only Pat’s first morning here and already Victoria has dragged her out of bed ( _ let’s not laze the day away! There’s so much to do together! _ ). Pat caught Vicky’s ankle as she slipped out from the bedsheets and kissed the delicate bones there, protesting,  _ this is together _ , but Vicky only giggled and escaped.

Now: waffles, and Vicky gushing.

“What do you want to do today, Patty? I have so many favorite places in New York City, and I’m going to be totally high from all this icing.”

Pat doesn’t feel it at all, has never been less hungry in her life, doesn’t know what’s wrong with her that she can’t just enjoy this fucking moment. She forks a huge chunk of waffle into her mouth anyway. Around buttery dough and too much icing and the taste of nothing, she says, “Let’s find out how many you can show me before sunset.”

 

By day three of this cohabitation vacation, Pat’s starting to get the hang of things. The trick is staying in constant motion. They roll out of bed and into the city, crowds and colors and traffic Chicago’s not dreamed of, and sightsee and shop and eat til they’re collapsing. Then it’s back to Vicky’s bedroom, avoiding eye contact with the roommates whose afternoons they’re about to ruin, fucking and napping til they’re ready for dinner. Vicky puts on makeup that sparkles and something slinky, Pat puts on jeans and a blazer, and on the way to the restaurant they find somewhere to buy a bottle of wine. Then sleep and repeat. If they build up enough momentum, it feels almost the same as being on tour. Pat has spent the last five years learning how to function on tour. This feels manageable to her in a way that ‘real life’ does not. There’s no need to think or feel or decide, Pat can just exist fluid and in the moment, anxiety-free. It’s easy in a way nothing’s ever easy. Pat’s pretty sure that means this a good relationship, that this is working.

On day four, they’re in line at a bagel place and Vicky’s scrolling on her Sidekick when she exclaims, “Oh my god, did you know Pete got married? She totally eloped with her cutie! There was a whole secret ceremony! That’s like, the opposite of announcing your engagement at an arena show. I guess now I’m less offended she didn’t let us throw a bachelorette. I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?”

Pat believes in playing to your strengths, and lying is not one of hers. She confesses: “Uh, yeah. I knew.”

Vicky leans into Pat and Pat wraps an arm around her. Rather than the thing Pat’s worried about ( _ were you there, why didn’t you tell me, oh my god do you still have feelings for Pete _ ), Vicky says some totally other alarming thing, which is, “Do you think you’ll ever get married?”

Which actually? Is easier to answer than any question about Pete’s wedding. Pat’s honest when she leans her head on Vicky’s shoulder and says, “I hope so. I want to. Do you?”

“Are you proposing to me right now?” Vicky laughs, making clear the joke, but it makes Pat’s heart clutch unpleasantly anyway. “Yeah, I mean, someday. I always pictured myself marrying a guy, you know, house in the suburbs and kiddos and all that.”

“Picturing yourself doing it isn’t the same as wanting to do it,” Pat murmurs, and maybe she’s talking more to her own mind’s eye, but Vicky nods her agreement.

“Yeah, that’s true. These days I guess I’m less sure than I was before. I’ve got this cool girlfriend putting all these ideas in my head…”

They’re next at the counter. They order bagels with way too much cream cheese, which Pat almost entirely fails to feel guilty about, and strike out for the Natural History museum. The city is cool and breezy with either the end of spring or the earliest part of summer. They take each other’s picture with dinosaur bones and eat the kind of Italian food Pat will spend the rest of her life dreaming of, even in Chicago. Basically, they have another perfect day in a series of perfect days. Pat doesn’t even realize she was hoping for a fight til they don’t have one.

*

“This is the last photoshoot I’ll be able to do this for,” Pete says breezily, shrugging her t-shirt over her head as casually as some people take off their shoes. She pats her belly, no longer flat, but not completely obvious yet either. She drops herself onto the cushions on the floor and picks up the camcorder that’s plugged into a fly’s eye grid of TV screens. She points the camera at her face and puffs out her cheek, sticks out her tongue. “This is the point, right? The vanity of Pete Wentz? My self-absorbed obsession with my own image or whatever?” She plants a big, wet kiss on the camera lens. The photographer’s shutter snaps wildly, the only encouragement she’s ever needed.

The woman styling her turns in tight, agitated circles while Pete rolls around with the camera and the set-up mirrors, taking to the conceit of the shoot all too well. “The point is—it’s supposed to be self-aware, Pete. It’s supposed to nod at the ways you’ve been exploited by the rock industry and your fans, and—”

“And get in on that exploitation just enough to sell some magazines,” Pete says. “Hey, should I take off my bra?”

It’s slightly evil, maybe, how much joy she takes in making other people uncomfortable. But there aren’t a lot of perks in being Pete Wentz; she’ll take them where she can get them. The stylist honest-to-god wrings her hands. “Please don’t take off your bra,” she squeaks.

Pete shrugs, harder to do than you might imagine when you’re rolling around on the ground, and holds the camcorder aloft with one hand, making sure she captures in the shot her latest trademark: with one hand unbuttoning her jeans.

Click, click, click. The photographer loves it. The stylist drops to her knees between Pete and the lens, ruining the shot. Pete stops unbuttoning. “For the love of god,” the stylist says, “if you don’t like the concept for the shoot, just  _ say so _ . We’re not recreating amateur internet nudes, okay? That’s not what I’m here to do!”

Pete, supine, blinks heavy and sexy and slow. “Isn’t it? Isn’t that what you’re all here to do?”

Pete’s just finished an interview with Out magazine, one where she addresses rumors about her sexuality and announces her pregnancy, ‘cause that scoop is gonna get scooped out from under her in another belly inch or two. She’s said the words  _ yes, I’m bisexual _ official and on the record for the first time in her life. She’s talked about her marriage, only a few weeks old at this point, and what it’s like to have a fetus growing inside her. She’s talked about women’s right to bodily autonomy and her support of Planned Parenthood. She’s sidestepped questions about the exact nature of her relationship with Pat, a skill she’s perfected over the years. She’s talked an awful lot about Pat and how amazing and talented she is, including a few suggestions that Out magazine would be better off interviewing Established Lesbian Rock Genius Pat Stump. But this, this is why she’s really here. Her and not any of the other member of her band. It’s her willingness to take her clothes off on camera. It’s her pussy plastered all over the goddamn internet. It’s every scandal she’s ever leaned into, every gossip mag she’s graced the cover of, every time she’s been drunk in public and on film and between the sheets. Her degradation, the way everyman can find something to hate about her: Pete knows these are the source of her fame. Anyone else in her band would have to be interviewed on the basis of  _ talent _ , which is so much less interesting. Sells fewer copies. Barely covers printing costs. Who cares about integrity and panties intact? Not the press, not the public, not Pete.

The stylist shoves her shirt into her hands, takes the camcorder away. Pete knows it’s because she’s already got the shots she wanted, not because the magazine is going to run something classier with her interview. Pete feels a special kindred to Jessica Rabbit at times like these.  _ I don’t mean to be bad. I’m just drawn this way.  _ The least she can do is help the people exploiting her feel uncomfortable about it. The least she can do is give them a bare fucking  _ hint _ of how it feels, to live in her skin all day, to wear this face, to be the girl behind the headlines and the bedroom eyes. To try and be a woman hacking out survival like this. Not just survival, but a name. A successful band and brand.  _ Fame _ .

She calls Jo on the drive home from the photoshoot. She’s stuck in traffic like everyone else in LA. “Hey babe, guess who just finished another nudie shoot,” she says instead of hello. She could wait and tell Andy when she gets home, since Andy’s taken up residence in the guest room of the house she suddenly and abruptly shares with Ash, but she knows what Andy’s gonna say and they are not going to give her  _ any _ credit for the sacrifices she makes for this band.

Jo doesn’t say hello either, opting to groan instead. It fills Pete’s whole car. Speakerphone makes it seem almost like Jo’s beside her.

“Roll your eyes a little louder, I couldn’t hear them rattling in your skull,” Pete says cheerfully. “Probably my last photoshoot til the baby pops, right? Unless somebody wants to fill my stretchies with glitter or something. I’m gonna be veiny like an October pumpkin. So anyway, you understand why I had to take my top off now, while it counted.”

“You know nobody’s asking you to do that, right?” Jo says. “Like, obviously some idiot once said to you  _ all press is good press _ , but I assure you that’s not the case.”

“Slut-shaming is not actually what I called for,” Pete declares. “Anyway, the label asks me to do it.”

“To take your shirt off? I was in that meeting, Pete. You  _ volunteered _ . That glass box nightmare was  _ your idea _ . Just like you volunteered for the Arms Race video and volunteered to pose topless on the cover of Rolling Stone, covering your nips while the rest of us wore t-shirts like normal people. Now you’re naked for this too? Like, when will your point be made?”

None of this is what she called for. Honestly, Pete would also like to know when the fuck her point will finally be made. But it’s not like the world is going to apologize to her for eating her alive. It’s not like men or the music industry or institutional misogyny are gonna call her up and say,  _ sorry you’re encased in glass for us to slaver over like a delicatessen meat, sorry that when we do it to you without your consent we call you a whore, sorry that the only thing more repulsive than a girl who has her virtue taken is one who gives it away, sorry we hate you more every time you willingly give us what we were gonna take either way, sorry that the contaminant in this culture rots so deep that even willingly given is a type of forcibly taken _ . It’s not like anyone is ever going to say those things to her, including her. So: when will Pete’s point be made? She’d love to know. But it’s obvious that it’s not fucking today.

So Pete distracts herself by thinking about the other thing she would love to know, which is: will Pat buy a copy of the magazine, see the word  _ bisexual  _ in print _ , _ feel a certain kind of way about it, and maybe possibly look just a little too long at the pictures? 

“I’m generating buzz,” Pete says pointedly, “for our new record. That is a good thing, Jo.”

“Are you sure that’s what you’re generating buzz for?” Jo mutters. “‘Cuz all I’ve heard you talk about so far are your titties.”

“I came out,” Pete blurts. As soon as it hits the air, she realizes that  _ this _ is what she called for. She called her one straight friend, apparently, to share the news. It twists so fast she can’t get her finger on it, but it’s true: today, on paper and in print, she finally came out.

She said the words she wouldn’t say, didn’t say, for Pat.

She has reasons, okay? Reasons on top of reasons why talking about her sexuality, openly, publicly, just wasn’t an option back then. A whole house of cards of reasons, a leaning tower of interlocking causality, a snaring spider’s web of what Pete tries very hard never to call  _ excuses _ .

“Okay, first, congratulations! That’s huge, it’s so brave, I want to hear everything you’re feeling and gush about how proud I am,” says Jo. “But second? Can we back up to a minute ago when you were talking about what the label wants you to do and kind of, uh, apply that logic to this situation?”

Pete can hear the clash between Jo The Friend and Jo The Band Manager unfolding. Even over the phone Jo sounds stressed out. “I mean, the reason they weren’t crazy about me and Pat going public is because they wanted me to seem, I don’t know, fuckable and available to our male audience.”

“Why would dudes listen to music if they couldn’t fuck it? Make perfect sense. Totally explains the Beatles, Metallica, all the greats,” mutters Jo.

“Right. But like, now I’m married. In a minute everyone’s gonna know I’m pregnant. I’m  _ not _ fuckable or available, and because of the baby, I’m not even gonna look like I am. So it shouldn’t matter now, if I say that I’m bi.” If she says it out loud enough times before the article goes to press, by the time their A&R guy at Island reads it, Pete will be able to say it to him with perfect confidence and 0% sweatiness.

“How does it feel, to know that’s gonna be printed in a magazine with your face on the cover? Are you nervous?”

Pete rifles through her heart like it’s a set of drawers, probing every soft spot, digging for the blood. She always digs until she finds blood, finds the poison or the pain in any scenario, even sweet ones. There’s no blood this time, though. Maybe it’s just that her fingernails are too short, but for once in her life, she is content to stop before she’s torn her own heart in half.

“I feel relieved,” she says, and it’s true. Her relief expands like an exhale, spreading to fill the interior of her car and the currently empty anxiety foxholes of her mind. “Everyone who’s close to me already knows, you know, because me and Pat were together for so long. And most everyone else can probably guess because, um, I wasn’t  _ super _ discreet about who I was dating when I first moved to LA…” Jo snorts. Pete chooses to ignore this, though she smiles automatically, ‘cause girls like Pete learn fast that it’s better to be in on the joke than just be the punchline. “So it’s like saying out loud what’s already obvious. It feels very official, having a label. Like shining a spotlight directly on something that was always there in my behavior but never talked about. Being bi has always been, like, my phantom limb. It’s weird but good to have it out there, in print, for real.”

“I’m really happy for you, Petey,” says Jo. “I wonder what Pat will think?” 

For all that Pete’s just been expounding on the power of saying things out loud and on the record, this is a conversation she is absolutely  _ not _ going to have. “The real question,” she says, changing the subject so blatantly it’s almost smooth, “is what you’re gonna have to start wearing so we don’t alienate all our male listeners. I’m thinking full bondage gear.”

“Our songs  _ will _ sound different if I’m wearing a gimp suit,” Jo says. “Better, I think.”

“You’ll be able to hear the testosterone. Thirty percent more of it.”

“Well thank  _ god _ for that! Hey, now that you’re a married lady and wise in the ways of love, can I complain about Mark for a minute? Because I’m going to actually murder him…”

They talk for the rest of Pete’s drive home. Pete’s secret about being stuck in LA traffic is that, really, she doesn’t mind it at all.


	7. you said that if i’m happy you’re cured, but i’m not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are phone calls, answered and not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy fucking shit, my dudes. i don't know if you read boys next door/assholes, but i wrote it while i was falling in love with a person who just left me, trashing my whole entire heart on his way out. i loved him deeply and i love him still. the letter pete writes in that fic is a real letter i wrote for him. that whole story is just--my heart at that moment, falling quickly into a sweet but uneasy love. it is now trapped forever, crystallized in amber. i am in a tremendous amount of pain.
> 
> so many of you have supported me and reached out to me during this time of fucking insensible loss, and i appreciate each of you. here, now, is another chapter of our intrepid girl out boys, and i am so sorry for every ounce of heartbreak i have written. i am tired of being in pain. halloween fluff and silliness is coming, because all of our hearts deserve to heal.
> 
> i love you guys very much. i love this story and the work it requires me to do in my own heart more than i can express, in this author's note or any. thank you for being here, thank you for reading, thank you for offering me kindness when i need it most. all i can do now is live in a way i can be proud of, and there is nothing i am more proud of than girl out boy. please, enjoy.
> 
> [songs to cry to i guess](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Humans are made of consequences. Emotional events have impact. We carry craters.

Andy wakes up with all kinds of half-formed selves and feelings blurring through their head. They’re disoriented and they  _ hurt _ : instead of lightness, their chest feels caved-in, like they’re struggling to breathe from under an impossible weight. It’s all ache. Their ribs are squeezed shut by the medical binder, white and compressing in earnest, holding their scars in place. Well, they aren’t scars yet: for now they’re just seams. Andy wakes, slips back under the anesthesia haze, wakes again. This time there are medical personnel around, nurses fussing, taking their blood pressure and snapping fingers next to their ear to pull their attention away from the numb bliss of the drugs. “Andy? Andy, I need you to join us now,  _ cariño _ ,” a Latinx nurse is saying. “I need to teach you how to keep your stitches clean.”

She smells very nice, and Andy wants to make her happy. “I’ve got craters,” Andy says, or tries to say. Their mouth feels cotton-stuffed, their tongue running half a second behind their brain. For years now, it’s been bandages and binders to strap down their chest, to crush, to conceal. It’s too strange to contemplate, now, that the bandages and binders are for the opposite, to keep wounds supported and sewn shut. Andy’s hands, clumsy as fish on dry land, flop at their torso. They need to get out of this smother. They need to see it to believe. They can’t even feel if they can feel it. Everything is pain, dull and distant and deafening. 

“First rule of keeping stitches clean: don’t touch them,” the nurse scolds, swatting their hands away. “Those wrappings stay on for the first 24 hours. Then you’re washing with the gentle antibacterial solution I’m giving you, you’re wrapping with clean bandages, and you’re getting that binder right back on.”

“Just want to look,” Andy protests. They focus as hard as they can on enunciation but they still end up sounding like Pat on their first record.

“You seen Frankenstein?” the nurse asks, her thin well-sculpted eyebrow arching high. Andy nods, and their body does not thank them for the movement. “Then you know what it looks like already. Hands off,  _ chulo _ .” 

Andy doesn’t have a quarter of the strength or energy or competence of this woman. They give up resistance and submit to her care.

 

A few hours later—although honestly, Andy feels more like they’ve traversed a vast distance than moved forward through time; you could tell them they’d just gotten off a freighter from Jupiter and woken from cryosleep and that would make more sense, with how scattered and druggy they’re feeling, than any measure of  _ time _ —

A few hours later they wake in the recovery room. They feel groggy from a million lightyears away, like they’re waking from a fever they had in another dimension. They are very thirsty and their skin feels very hot. The world squeezes tightly.

“Rise and shine, champ,” Pete says. It makes sense on a deep, cellular level for Pete to be at their side, so Andy doesn’t question it. They tip their head so their temple falls against Pete’s shoulder—she’s squeezed herself onto this hospital cot, apparently unaware she’s growing much larger than she’s accustomed to being—and mumble, “Don’t say it.”

“Say what?”

“How lucky I am you’re here. Don’t say, how were you gonna call a cab ‘n check into a hotel when you dunno if you even have feet.”

Pete strokes Andy’s head and laughs softly. “You’re slurring, like, a lot? So I’m not totally sure what you’re saying. But I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’re thanking me.”

“M’ not stupid,” it feels important for Andy to say. “The plan woulda worked.”

Pete kisses the side of their head. “Someday you will learn to just ask me for help when you need it, and we won’t have to go through this whole ordeal anymore,” she says with the confidence of a soothsayer. “But until then, my beautiful dummy? I’ll be here to care for you against your will.”

“Jus’ don’t say it,” Andy insists, and then they drop back into the welcome of the rolling grey fog.

 

Andy’s not sure how they got to Pete’s house or how many times they’ve woken between then and now, but this time, their eyes blink open with a sense of will that the painkiller anesthetic haze had sapped out of them. Andy has never been drunk or high in their life, so they have no reference for what it feels like to have a body burn out so much  _ stuff _ . Even their sweat stings, smelling toxic. The whole thing, mushy-headed and slipping through time, memories rotten with wormholes, the clenching nausea they feel now, their inability to tell what day it is or if their bandage needs to be changed or how many times they have woken up in this exact bed before: they don’t care for it. They do not wish to repeat the experience.

They sit up too fast and the world statics out, a satellite losing signal. Then the room clarifies and they gaze around at the guest room in Ash’s house. The last time they were in LA, Pete was still living in her own apartment, all glass and chrome and black geometric furniture Andy couldn’t figure out how to sit on. It had seemed a bad fit for the girl they’d known, the girl they’d lived with: inhospitable, sterile, so sharp you wouldn’t feel it cut you. They’re not sure if the cozy seaside cottage vibe of this bedroom suits Pete any better. Andy misses when Pete knew who she was. It’s exhausting, watching her flit through ill-fitting identities. Zoo animal, mascot, masked: she writes about how she feels all the time. But Andy’s never been very interested in costumes.

Andy jumps at the sound of sudden, violent friction. It takes them a few rounds of buzzing before they realize it’s their cell phone vibrating on the white wooden bedside table. They fumble the phone to their ear and answer, not even looking at the number.

This is their first mistake.

Their second is not ending the call immediately when a cautious voice crackles over the line, “Andrea?”

“I hope you have the wrong number,” Andy says. Their voice is the first sharp thing in this weird, itching world of cotton-cloudy after. “You won’t find anyone who answers to that name here.”

“Andrea, it’s your—it’s Darrell.”

Andy’s a deer in headlights. Their nervous system lights up and locks down.  Their breath scrapes ragged in too-tight lungs.

“Andy, I mean,” their stepfather corrects. “Uh. I wasn’t sure if this was the right number til I heard your voice. I guess I’m still not sure. It is you, isn’t it? Andy?”

Andy hasn’t heard from Darrell since a couple years after they moved out of their mom’s house for good. The hysterical phone calls from their mom never stopped—neither did the virulent misgendering—so finally, they changed their number. They send their mom a Christmas card, one with no return address. A few times they went to their grandma’s for Thanksgiving. But at a certain point it just hurt too much. At a certain point, Andy didn’t need another thing weighing them down. 

So you could say that getting a call from Darrell now is a bit of a surprise.

“Andy? Hello?”

It’s not elegant, but Andy’s relieved just to be able to get words out of their mouth. They say, “What do you want?”

“You know, you’re not making this easy,” Darrell mutters. “Nothing’s easy with you.”

“I’m sorry I’m not more convenient for you, Darrell,” Andy says in their customer service voice, the one they perfected when they were 16 and working retail to fund their live music addiction. “Believe it or not, I’ve got other shit going on right now.”

“I’m calling to tell you your mother’s sick,” Darrell says. “Skin cancer, but they’re doing more biopsies and it looks like it’s in the organs. She didn’t want to tell you.”

Andy’s lips are feeling chapped. They realize suddenly they’re incredibly thirsty. They rub a thumb over the roughness of their bottom lip, feeling it from far away. “So why are you telling me?”

Darrell sounds openly disgusted, which is to say, he sounds like he’s always sounded when speaking to Andy. “To give you a chance to be a daughter for once. Because there are enough regrets between you two, and I thought maybe you’d want to make sure you don’t create another.”

It must be the painkillers that keep the word from stinging. Andy hasn’t been anyone’s daughter in a very long time, if they ever were. Andy says, “Thank you for the information. I’m getting off the phone now.”

They hang up without waiting for a goodbye.

*

Here’s what Jo Trohman does to get hyped up before a big play:

  * Watch the part in _Empire Strikes Back_ where Luke goes into the cave to face his fears
  * Listen to the 1990s Chicago Bulls theme music
  * Touch the peeling Arma Angelus tour poster she still has on her wall, a relic from her first time on the road, her first time in a band, the first time she was measurably and undeniably better than a dude
  * Call her mom and get heated about something she wasn’t involved in, like how loudly Uncle David snored during synagogue last week 
  * Rock out her very hardest to Black Flag
  * Sing _Be A Man_ from Mulan at the top of her lungs



For this, she does all six.

She calls the label. She has a direct line for Bob, who manages their contract with Island, but Jo’s pretty sure he screens her calls. She calls the general number and asks to be put through, and is surprised not at all when the operator (the dude operator) says, “Inquiries about internships have to be submitted to the HR department, and we don’t accept unsolicited requests for representation.”

“Do we have to do this every time?” she asks. “Is it Nate again? Cuz we did this last week.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t—”

“The thing where I ask to be put through to a man who  _ works for me and my band _ and you act like I’m a fan or some silly Coyote Ugly hopeful with a cassette tape, because you don’t think women can be successful rock musicians? This thing that’s happening right now? It’s Jo Trohman, Nate. From Fall Out Boy. I’m pretty sure you remember me.”

A long pause. The three lattes Jo slammed for courage are making her twitch. “I’m sorry to be blunt with you. But come  _ on _ , dude.”

“Ms. Trohman,” says the operator. His voice is the sound of a cringe. “I remember you now.”

“Great. That makes us friends, basically. And as a friend I want to talk to you about the  _ Ms _ . When Bono calls, do you call him  _ Mr. Hewson _ ? Like, are you this repressed with everyone? Or is it another one of those patriarchy things, where you want to make me feel small and managed, and even you haven’t interrogated the reasons why?”

“Um,” Nate croaks. “Island doesn’t represent U2 anymore, Ms. Trohman.”

There’s no point bothering with some people. “Hoookay,” Jo sighs. She figures, better stick to the boy’s strong suits. “Can you just put me through to Bob, honey?”

And then she’s ringing through to their label manager, it’s Rocky IV, Bob’s picking up the phone, Jo’s going into the ring. She takes a deep breath and starts talking way too fast. “We need studio time, Bob, as I’ve mentioned in at least five voicemails. I know you’re avoiding my calls, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe you  _ want _ us to default on our contract, because I’m not sure if you know how pregnancy works, but it’s not gonna get any easier for Pete to hold her bass if we keep waiting, and then before you know it there’s a baby instead of a record and—”

“Jo? Is this Jo Trohman?”

_ “Oh, come the fuck on, Bob,” _ Jo does not say. She’s the responsible one, somehow, the one who keeps this band running: and that means she indulges Bob McLynn in his games. He knows perfectly well it’s Jo, because she’s called every three days for the last two weeks.

“Speaking,” she says instead, as cheery as she can make herself. “Anyway, as I was saying—”

“Hold up, Jo. You’re sounding a little worked up. Why don’t we schedule a time you can come into the office and we can hash things out, calmly, in person?”

Jo takes a big, slow breath. Inhale,  _ fuckyourselfbob _ , exhale. Sugar-sweet and a little stupid, that’s how men like her best. “Yes. Perfect. We’ve got a lot of ideas for the new record, and the girls and me are really just itching to get into the studio. You’re gonna love how it sounds. I’ll come in this week, and—”

“This week? Not possible. How about the end of the month? I’ve got time on the 30th. We’ll do lunch, you can make your pitch, I’ll get the execs on our side, and before you know it, you’re in the studio.”

Jo bites the inside of her lip to keep her voice sounding calm. “That’s practically a month away. I want us in the studio by the end of July. Again, we’re racing a developing fetus, here. And our contract covers this record, so it’s kinda bullshit to act like anything needs to be  _ pitched _ .”

“Let’s not get hysterical,” says Bob, and it’s so condescending Jo wants to reach through the phone and choke him. The word  _ hysterical _ has been used to dismiss and deprive women since, like, 300 B.C. It’s funny: she used to fight for her band by literally fighting, being ready to come after and tear down any dude who stood in their way (or in between them). Now she has to fight by not fighting, by swallowing the menstrual rage on her tongue or whatever Bob thinks it is she’s feeling, and keeping her voice light and nice.

Sometimes Jo hates success.

“I’m not trying to make your life difficult. I’m just asking you to do your job as liaison between us and the label’s bank account and…  _ liaise _ ,” she says. Her voice is light and sweet as fucking meringue. 

“I’ll see what I can do, Jo, but it’s not as easy as you think.”

Jo knows there’s a budget earmarked for this record, knows the label committed to putting up money for studio time when they signed. What Bob’s saying is that it’s just not that important to him, that it’s not a priority, even with their singles from  _ Infinity on High  _ tearing up the radio. Arms Race is near the top of the  _ Billboard 100 _ , and the record’s been platinum since a month after it dropped. It’s exactly as easy as Jo thinks.

“It’s not like I’m asking to play Wrigley Field,” she says, making her voice placating and smooth like she’s talking Pat down from a hypothetical crisis. “I just want some studio time this summer. You start working on the suits  _ now _ , and I’ll email you some demos. Wait til you hear what Pat’s working on. I know it’s gonna change your mind.”

Bob heaves this long-suffering sigh and says, “Okay, Jo. I’m going out on a limb for you here.”

Jo resolves to fire him as soon as she is contractually able. She’s been managing this band for years, she doesn’t need him as a go-between. She’s certain the execs will be utterly charmed by her manner and Rocky analogies. Who wouldn’t be? Jo’s the picture of charm.

To prove it, she schmoozes, “Oh my gosh, thank you, you’re a lifesaver. We’re gonna dedicate the next album to  _ you _ .” And she doesn’t even choke as she says it.

*

“Vegan cheese dip. Vegan cheese dip!”

“What about it?”

“Put it in the cart.”

“The cart is already full of snacks.”

“I want  _ cheese dip  _ and I can’t use my arms! You’re supposed to be  _ taking care of me _ .”

Pete rolls her eyes in playful excess of her actual level of annoyance. Andy would never allow her to admit it, but Pete has always enjoyed taking care of her friend in this way. Andy recovering from surgery at her house—well, Ash’s house, but Pete’s gonna start feeling like she belongs there any day now—is one of the best things that’s happened to her all summer.   

Here’s the truth, if you want it: marriage is every bit as lonely as what came before. Ash is her best friend, functionally—the person she sees more than any other. She falls asleep with him pressed against her back, wakes up beside him. She texts him about what’s in the fridge and what ought to be. He calls her when he’s running late.  _ I can’t believe I get to kiss my best friend _ , Pete told a reporter, and she didn’t mean  _ get to _ like an opportunity, she meant it like being allowed. The weird thing about heteronormativity is how, once you get married, that’s kind of it. Like a wedding vow is a blank check and now all your needs are met forever, like this one person who’s agreed to be yours is gonna be all things to you, satisfy your aching, rambly heart in every way, for the rest of time. Like you’re surrendering your body, spirit, and soul, and all the things you used to get from various friends and lovers and adventures that nourished you, now you’re going to get them all just from this one human. Like that’s what you’re trading yourself for. Like that’s the bargain.  _ You get all of me, only me, forever, and I get all of you, only you. And that’s enough. It’s part of the bargain that that’s got to be enough. _

So Pete, Pete plus the thing swimming inside of her, the daughter-shape, the nascent girl-form, they try not to think about how lonely they are. Admitting they’re already lonely in the first joyous months of marriage seems like an ill portent, seems like saying they’re broken, when Pete’s brokenness has already been documented enough. Pete focuses on distraction, on anything-everything she can use to fill herself up. 

Pete puts vegan cheese dip in the cart.

Andy, arms at their sides with excessive helplessness, smiles sweetly. “Thaaaaanks, Petey,” they sing.

“You’re nicer on pain meds,” Pete says. “I like it.”

“What weird junk are you craving? You’re my first pregnant friend, I wanna do all the movie stuff,” Andy says. “Like, eat pickles upside down in a tube slide, or run out at 3am ‘cuz you need Mr. Pibb, with ice, from dispenser and not a can.”

Pete leans against the cart and advances them slowly through the aisles of the store. She laughs at Andy, and they both ignore the not-so-discreet camera flashes capturing them. Pete’s butt is huge in sweatpants, her bangs limp against her sweaty forehead. She hasn’t showered or put on makeup in days. She hopes she looks monstrous and fat in the pictures they’re taking, hopes she gets scandalized headlines like any woman in Hollywood who’s ever allowed herself an off day. Something about pregnancy feels powerful and arcane, like there is power in growing hideous and rank with fecundity, Grendel’s mother. She wants hairy warts on her chin and a belly so big she must waddle. She wants to be grotesque. 

“I haven’t really had any weird specific cravings yet,” she tells Andy. “You’re having them all for me.”

Andy, with a packet of vegan jerky in their hand, decides, “Grilled cheese with dried cranberries inside, aerosol whipped cream, and sweet chili Doritos.”

“Oh, is that my pregnancy snack regimen?”

“Nutrition is very important to a developing fetus. Hold on tight,” Andy adds, fitting themself behind Pete. They grab the cart handle, Pete steps onto the bar, and Andy pushes them through the grocery store with increasing speed. They nearly take out a soda display as Andy whips them around a corner, and other shoppers are clearly scandalized, but Pete can’t stop her laughter.

“Pregnant lady coming through!” Andy hollers. “Whipped cream emergency!” They skid through the freezer section. Pete’s cackling so loud it rings through the store.

By the time they’re checking out, everyone in the store hates them. Pete has tears on her cheeks from laughing so hard. Andy’s grinning too, and neither of them are choosing to point out that pushing a woman and a cart through Sprout’s at top speed is not exactly  _ taking it easy _ and  _ not exerting yourself _ . 

“This reminds me of when we lived together,” Andy says, while Pete unloads their cart onto the conveyer belt and they keep their arms in a resting position.

“Those were good times, weren’t they?”

“The best. You saved me, whisked me away to a crappy apartment palace. My Prince Charming!”

“Prince Just Charming Enough. You saved me too.” Pete frowns at the third carton of coconut milk ice cream, thinking that they’re going to overflow Ash’s freezer with all this stuff. Well, so be it: it’s her freezer too.

Pete stands by the credit card reader and Andy tucks their chin onto her shoulder from behind. They probably look like a happy couple, and with abrupt sharpness Pete wishes she didn’t usually shop for groceries alone.

“Back when it was just the two of us in that apartment,” Pete says, “before the other girls moved in. We weren’t lonely, were we? I wasn’t. To you did I seem—like I could be okay?”

She’s embarrassed before the question is all the way out. The cashier is side-eyeing her hard. But Andy, perfect Andy, nestles deeper into Pete, slips an arm around her expanding waist. “You are capable of holding so much joy and love within you. It won’t leak out. You are going to be so, so happy. I know it.”

And maybe it’s the pain meds. And maybe the tears on Pete’s cheeks aren’t just from laughter. But Andy’s arms around her feel like belonging, and Pete remembers she believes in home.

*

Pat is shopping for sneakers.

She doesn’t, strictly speaking,  _ need _ sneakers. Sure, some of the sneaks in her collection are getting a little snug (who the fuck knew even your feet gain weight?), but not to the point where she can’t wear them. No, Pat’s shopping because she needs to do  _ something _ with her emotions, and the exhilaration and concomitant guilt of dropping a couple hundred bucks on brand name kicks will keep her busy for a while.

The other thing she’s doing is ignoring Vicky’s calls.

Pat couldn’t tell you why she’s doing this. It’s much less clear than the situation with the sneakers. Whenever she talks to Vicky, she just feels— _ bad _ inside.

So: high performance, hand-stitched gym shoes she will clean with a toothbrush. Pat attaches her attention to this task entirely. If she focuses hard enough, it’s like there’s nothing else. 

 

Okay, so lately she feels like she’s drowning 100% of the time. All she knows is it hurts, hurts, hurts. She doesn’t know why. Her vagus nerve churns inside her, twisting like a kite string from the emotional center of her brain down to the base of her guts. Her lungs ache and her stomach knots around it. Her resting anxiety is at an all-time high; she feels peeled raw. She’s a fucking peel and eat shrimp, she can’t sleep, and literally everything makes her cry. If her life is the way she wants it, the way she chose to arrange it, why does she feel like this? Who decided emotions should be felt in the body anyway? Everything is bullshit. Pat wants a new heart or a new life and she can’t have either.

Because she is always and only who she is, she pours her sorrows into writing a four-piece horn arrangement. She wants the new record to feel as gutshot as she does. She wants a way to get all this stuff  _ out _ .

Isn’t the point of friendship and love to fool yourself into feeling like life is enough? Don’t answer that. But—isn’t it?

 

“Pat, I’m worried about you. It’s been days since we talked. I texted Pete and she said she hadn’t heard from you either. Call me.”

“Look, if I freaked you out with what I said in New York, I’m sorry. I don’t want you to worry about it. I didn’t mean like, I want to live together  _ now _ . I just meant—I miss the way it was on tour, I miss seeing you every day. I miss fucking you. I want to visit and see your place in Chicago, that’s all. I’m not planning on bringing anything more permanent than a suitcase. Okay? It’s just—fuck, I didn’t imagine saying this for the first time on your voicemail, but—I’m falling for you. Okay? Like, the big L. The double L: lesbian love. Call me back. Please.”

“This is your official notice that I’m pissed at you. You can’t just ignore me til I go away. That’s not how girlfriends work. I told my  _ mom _ about you. Call me, okay?”

Delete, delete, delete.

More than ever, Pat feels like Pete. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> p.s. lovebreaklearn drew the parallel between pete and this [amazing slam poem](https://femmefocus101.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/hi-im-a-slut/) and they are not wrong. enjoy the bonus feature?


	8. what’s left of my heart’s still made of gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the gang arrives at Oakwood, there is a tea temperature conspiracy, and Andy reckons with attachment trauma.
> 
> [jaaaams](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you everyone for your love and support <3 please enjoy this chapter and tell me all your thoughts and feelings! keep your eye out next week for a fluffy halloween surprise.

 

“You’re the first chicks I’ve ever dropped off here,” their driver tells them. “Except, ya know, girlfriends and tail for hire. You sure all this equipment is for you?”

He’s unloading the back of the black Suburban the label sent for them. Jo wishes he would not. She stands with her arms crossed over her thin tank top, because she didn’t wear a bra and she doesn’t want this particular dude to see even the _outline_ of her nipples, not after that comment. He doesn’t deserve them. She’s got blackout Raybans concealing her glare, but she’s pretty sure he can feel it, ‘cause his chummy laugh dies in his throat when he glances her way.

She was excited, when Island offered to put them up in creative housing to speed the recording process along. (Jo can be relentless.) Taking in the grim housing complex before them now, Jo’s starting to feel stupid. It’s probably her least favorite way to feel.

“You ladies make sure you lock your doors at night. Chain too,” the driver says.

“Why? Are _you_ coming back?” Pat mutters under her breath. She throws herself in his path to get to her guitar case before he can put his hands on it, clearly sharing Jo’s distaste for letting this dude think he has any special equipment-lugging qualifications women don’t. They’re a girl band, as everyone is so quick to tell them: they’ve been hauling their own equipment for years. Jo’s got biceps like beef jerky, hard with sinew and perfectly toned for amp schlepping. She’s not in the habit of swooning with gratitude over men’s condescension; none of them are.

Actually, Jo’s a little surprised Andy _is_ letting the driver put his hands on their equipment. Andy is notorious for babying their kit. But they’re standing off to the side, looking pale and flushed at once, with a hangdog look instead of the mighty scowl they usually aim at anyone with the audacity to fuck with their equipment. Pete, currently shaped like a snake who swallowed an egg, fits her hands to her belly and makes no attempt to carry her own shit whatsoever.

“I’m sure you’ll be safe,” the driver blathers on. “This expensive stuff is going to the studio, right? That’s a good call.” There is a drug deal happening just a few cars down in the parking lot, anxious white kids slouching against a coupe worth more than Jo earns a year buying baggies from a bleached blonde. Jo and the blonde meet sunglasses, exchange a look light can’t permeate. Oakwood Apartments is the kind of place where you can’t tell the parents of the child actors from the drug dealers, where the child actors and the kids bumming nugs are indistinguishable. Maybe they’re the same kids, Jo doesn’t know. No one here looks like they remember what color hair they were born with.

Inside the Mission-style stucco facade, past the cracked concrete balconies and leaf-choked swimming pool, everything is beige in a disheartening way. The girls cluster together in the center of the hallway, like all of them spontaneously reached the same conclusion about the undesirability of brushing against these sweaty-looking walls. Andy bravely takes the lead, unlocking the door to the first of their two second-story rooms. It swings open with an ominous creak, revealing…

“Oh thank god my feet hurt so much,” Pete says as she pushes past her friends to flop onto the first bed she sees. The set-up is somewhere between a dorm room and a studio apartment: kitchenette, sofa bed, coffee table, corner desk. Light sneaks past bent-up blinds, casting a glow like room temperature milk through streaky windows. Behind a partial wall, Jo can just see the edge of another bed and a door that presumably leads to a bathroom. The bedspread Pete is currently starfishing on looks a little greasy. The carpet is suspiciously stiff under Jo’s feet, like they really had to use the industrial stuff to get it clean after whatever sexual tragedy happened here. Everything looks a little rickety, a little sad.

“Does anyone else feel like they’re in a crime scene?” Jo asks. She’s clutching her backpack to her chest rather tightly. She wants to breathe normally, it’s just that she’s having trouble remembering how.

Behind them, the driver humps in with some of their luggage. “Don’t worry about the bedbugs,” he says. “They got that alllll cleared up a few weeks back.”

Jo has never seen Pete get out of a bed so fast.

“Please stop saying things that will make it difficult to sleep here,” Andy tells the driver. They hold out a folded ten dollar bill. It is unclear if this is a tip for his service or a bribe for his silence. “You can go now.”

The guy does a big sigh, like they’re really being incredibly rude, and lets himself out. The door doesn’t really close right: it sits skewed in the frame, so there’s a good half-inch crack around the top edge of the frame that anyone at all could peer through.

And that’s pretty much Oakwood in a nutshell.

Pat claps her hands with cheerfulness that is obviously forced. “So, um, who’s ready to hit the studio?”

“And leave all this luxury behind?” says Andy. “Absolutely.”

 

As bad as the housing is, that first day in the studio makes up for it. The friction and tension of tour has dissipated with the weeks apart. Jo keeps an eye on Pat, the circles under her eyes, the way her voice veers towards sniping when she’s stretched too thin, but sees no sign of her friend’s worse qualities today. There is harmony, somehow, between Pete and Pat. They sneak shy smiles across the room to each other, offer gentle feedback about ideas. Pete runs her fingertips across bars of music in Pat’s notebook, mouthing lyrics onto the melody; Pat watches her lips move. Jo can’t tell if this is more or less dangerous than when they’re fighting. For today, she just enjoys the peace.

Andy’s got drumsticks in their back pocket, but they don’t attempt to play, which is unusual: keeping them off a drum kit is usually like keeping a moth off a lightbulb. But they sit back on a stool at the mixing table instead, cocking their head, listening, letting their head bob deep with the percussion tracking Pat’s put together. Everyone is bringing their best today and no one wants to fight. Their whole hearts are at the table. There is no scorn.

Jo thinks, _This is going to work_. Then Pete throws up in the trash can in the corner of the studio and she revises: _Probably_.

*

Pat’s sitting on the balcony with herbal tea and a Joan Jett biography when she hears the sliding door open on the next balcony over. The sides of the balconies are walled off, separating them, so you’d have to lean out past the railing to see if you had company. Pat knows Pete’s unaware of her presence as she hears her friend’s voice say, “The whole world knows I’m an open book, but why is this suddenly so important?”

Pete’s voice is cast low for privacy, and she sounds unhappy. Pat’s lifting her hand to knock on the wall and call out to Pete that she’s not alone when Pete says, “I’m with Pat literally all the time. This isn’t different.”

She’s going to hell for this, but Pat lowers her hand again. She keeps quiet and listens.

“I don’t care what she said at the wedding, I care what you and I said at the wedding! _Til death do us part_ , remember? So whether or not I had a thing with her—”

Pat curls her feet up under her on the patio chair. She wraps her arms around her knees and tries to make herself a tiny, invisible ball, like this will make her quieter. Her thighs stick together with humidity under her skirt. This reminds her of a fight she could be having with Vicky, probably, if she were inclined to pick up her phone. Except that’s the difference between her and Pete, always has been: she told people about them. Vicky already knows.

Sometimes hearing only one side of the conversation is more than enough. “Yes! Okay, yes! Does that make you happy? We used to fuck. We used to fuck all night and then all day and then all night again, and it was fucking _incredible_. Is that what you wanted to hear? I was in love with her, Ash. She was my soulmate and I thought it was forever. Do you feel better yet? Do you?”

Pat regrets, now, that she stayed to hear what Pete would say about her. She wishes she could slink back inside, but she’s too worried Pete will hear the door and know someone overheard her. She cannot move.

“Don’t ask me that as if it has _any_ thing to do with me loving you.” Pete’s voice is tight with exasperation and Pat’s pulse is skipping slick inside her throat. “The human heart is capable of wonders, and I pity you if yours is so small. ”

Nope, nope, nope. She can’t be in this situation. Should she cover her ears? Should she throw herself off the balcony? It’s only the second story, so it’s unlikely to be fatal, but maybe she’ll get _really_ lucky. But before she can fling herself to possible-death, Pat has a better idea. She creeps silently to the patio door, whips it open, and slams it as loudly as possible. “Gosh, it’s glorious out here!” she says loudly, possibly overselling it, as if she only just now stepped outside.

Two seconds later, Pete’s head pops around the separating wall. “It’s muggy and there’s a weird smell coming off the pool,” she informs Pat. She’s still holding her phone. “It is not _glorious_.”

“Um, I don’t smell it. Maybe it’s your, you know, preggo super senses?” Pete’s sense of smell has been incredibly delicate over the last few days. This morning she ran out of the studio gagging because Jo opened a stick of cinnamon gum.

Pete’s looking at the mug of tea Pat left sitting on the little end table a minute ago. “Wait, have you been out here this whole time?” she asks.

Pat’s deception style could not be described as ‘swift’ or ‘seamless.’ “No. I mean, yes, obviously I _was_ out here, but earlier. That’s when—the mug. But no. Old tea. I just got here.”

“So if I climb over there and stick my hand in the tea, it’ll be cold? It won’t be hot. Because it’s from earlier.”

Pat thinks fast. She crosses the little balcony, picks up the mug, and downs the tea in one massive gulp. She smacks her lips, pretending like she didn’t just burn the hell out of the throat she’s meant to be babying. “Yep. Cold as ice,” she gasps.

Pete’s eyes narrow. “Ash, I’ll call you later. Band emergency,” she says, and hangs up her phone and shoves it into her back pocket before he could possibly have had time to respond. Then she hoists one knee up onto the railing like she really is going to climb over to Pat’s balcony.

“What are you doing? You pregnant psychopath! Use the door if you want to come over!”

But this is the girl who jumped off her parents’ roof with a beach umbrella for a stupid stunt video. She’s not backing down just because Pat started shrieking. She’s not _not_ unnecessarily climbing across a railing two stories up just because she’s 5 months pregnant.

Pete drags, wobbles, and crawls, but doesn’t fall. Somehow she maneuvers her unwieldy body across the negative space and plants her feet safely on the cracked outdoor tile, unfazed by the years she just took off Pat’s cardiac life. She lunges for the mug Pat’s clutching in terror, and Pat realizes what she’s doing nearly too late. Just before Pete can touch the mug and test its temperature, Pat hurls it off the balcony. They both turn and watch it sail out over the parking lot and land in the small greenish pool.

“You motherfucking liar,” Pete laughs, staring in wonder after the mug’s arc. “What a throw! I can’t believe you never played softball.”

The whole situation is so stupid, so reminiscent of their ridiculous youth, Pat starts laughing too. “I can’t believe I just tried to solve an interpersonal problem by chugging tea and chucking glassware,” she giggles.

“You kidding? That’s classic Pat. The tea was hot, though, right?” Pete’s eyes are bright, her cheeks pink from laughing. Her hair is getting long, kinking up with pregnancy hormones that outpower her relaxer. She’s just a little thick, the padding of a selkie firming up her formerly sparrow-slender self. She looks vital and strong in a way she didn’t before, no longer a pane of glass but now the thing that breaks it. Things have felt so good, easy, natural with her this last week in the studio. Pat’s finding it hard to catch her breath.

“I’ll never tell,” Pat says, and she doesn’t ask herself if she’s flirting.

Pete’s long lashes flutter. She steps closer. “And if I kissed you…?”

“Yes?” Pat can barely manage a whisper.

“Would your lips be warm?”

Pat’s hand flies to her lips, a last-ditch barrier between them. They’re hot, but she bets Pete’s would scald.

Writing music together isn’t just _good_. Isn’t just easy. Isn’t just natural. Writing music is the way they fell in love. It’s impossible not to remember how it felt, the first time. Is it possible not to feel it again? What if Pat could love Pete, but not need her? She could survive that. Couldn’t she?

Pete lunges, snapping her jaws like a wolf, and laughs wildly. Pat stumbles back, the moment erased like it never was. God, is she thirsting for her pregnant, married best friend? That’s—that is pathetic. Pat shakes her head, Etch-a-Sketch, so the parted breathless lips are wiped away and the friendly smile is reinstated.

“My lips are 98.6 degrees, like all human skin,” she says. She dodges another lunge, colliding with the end table. “Weirdo!”

Jo’s face appears in the blinds. She taps the glass. Pete freezes in her pursuit, and Pat maintains her defensive position. “What are you freaks doing?” Jo asks through the glass. Sound carries surprisingly well. “Why is there so much talk about human skin in this band? And why are you slamming things around?”

Pete dives for the door handle, surprisingly quick for a pregnant lady, and cracks the sliding glass door. She puts her face in the crack and says, “Josephine, my favorite friend? Would you mind telling me how long Pat’s been on the balcony? Just trying to figure out if she needs to be punished for eavesdropping or not.”

Pat looks at the thin little railing, the unsupported space she would need to cross to make it onto Pete’s balcony. She considers bolting, she does. She may not be able to stop the truth from getting out, but it’s just possible she can outrun it. She doesn’t know what will happen if she looks at Pete’s face and admits she overhead her fighting with her husband about loving Pat, but she can’t bear to find out.

Jo looks disgusted by their antics. “I have no idea what Patricia is doing, other than disturbing my nap,” she says primly. “Pipe the fuck down, children.”

Jo drops the blinds, obscuring herself. There’s a brief tug-of-war and then she gets the door latched. Pat distinctly hears the lock.

“You got me exiled to the balcony,” she complains to Pete.

“At least we’ve got a book,” Pete says. She appears to be in no hurry to get back to her phone call, or to get back inside. Instead she settles herself onto one of the patio chairs and looks up at Pat expectantly. “Read to me?”

It’s just like it always was. Pat can’t resist.

*

Andy’s body is healing fast. Their scars are livid things, purple and pulsing, but more like scars and less like slits every day. There’s a routine to it: cleaning, rubbing with salve, wrapping in fresh cloth, avoiding the drum kit and not mentioning to Jo or Pat why. There’s an indignity to the private body made public, to their healing being a _band issue_ , to Andy’s body belonging to more than just themself. Their silence is a rebellion, a pushing back. Cis people are never asked to do this: to explain and defend their biology.

Well, except maybe cis women who are visibly pregnant. There are certain parallels Andy sees between themself and Pete, the way Andy feels invaded by the world and the way the world runs right up to Pete and puts their hands on her growing belly. Andy hasn’t told the other girls and they resent the idea they ought to. Andy doesn’t know why they are cutting themself off from the people they love best.

Andy doesn’t know why they are cutting themself off from the people they love best at the same time they are dialing their mother’s phone number and almost, almost pressing _Call_ on a nightly basis. There are so many possible avenues of hurt, why would they pursue this one?

Andy doesn’t have answers.

Not every part of them heals as fast, or as orderly, or as routine, as the scars of a major surgery.

Andy is doing Leg Day in the sub-basement gym at Oakwood. Every day has been Leg Day since the surgery, and when they look at their limp noodle arms, it is hard not to mourn the extremely hard-won biceps that so recently vacated that tattooed space. The overhead light, a nauseous fluorescent, flickers. The wall-to-wall mirrors run with a jagged crack, and everything about the space—including the mac-and-cheese-powder paint showing everywhere that’s not mirrors—screams ‘murder site.’ Like, if Andy is going to get murdered, it’s almost definitely going to be here. Usually they only feel this way in public bathrooms.

So they about have a heart attack when the door bangs open, and drop the machine-assisted leg press with a yelp. On the threshold of this grim, poorly ventilated dungeon stands Jo Trohman in bike shorts, an oversize Distillers shirt, and a high ponytail that forms that shape of an active volcano over her head.

Jo points right at Andy and says, “Sexy lady arms. I want ‘em.”

“And?”

“And you’re the only person I know who works out, like, at _all_. Everybody else still thinks they can live on pizza and secondhand smoke forever like a bunch of Lost Boys. So: teach me.”

Andy grips the padded edge of the leg press seat and considers. They’ve always enjoyed having company around when they exercise; for cardio they love the meditative trance, but for strength sometimes they really appreciate good ol’ fashioned distraction from the screaming muscle fibers. And Jo is one of their favorite human beings. It should be an easy yes, but Andy hesitates. Jo hanging around in the gym could easily lead to inconvenient questions.

Jo helpfully demonstrates the quandary live and in that moment by saying, “You know, this may be the first time I have _ever_ seen you work out with a shirt on. I wish I’d brought a camera.”

“Oh yeah? This an image you want to keep for yourself?” Andy flexes a small, sweaty bicep, kisses their own t-shirt sleeve.

“For _posterity_ ,” Jo corrects. “I _personally_ find you gross.”

They exchange a grin, one grown in the sun of long friendship and the shade of slow flirtation. “Uh-huh. Sure,” Andy smiles. Then, impulsively, because in this moment they feel close to Jo: “I’ll help you with sexy lady arms if you help me with my mom.”

Jo plops down on the bench closest to Andy’s machine and pillows her chin in her hand. “Oh my god, An, are you about to tell me about your personal life? Voluntarily?”

Andy scowls. They hop to their feet and swat at Jo. “Get some dumbbells in your hands and maybe. You came down here to work, you’re gonna work.” Jo selects a pair of little 3lb weights like she’s about to do an 80s step workout. Andy takes them out of her hands and replaces them with 8s. “Okay, Denise Austin, let’s start a little more ambitious than that. In this house we lift to failure.”

They model the appropriate posture for curls with an empty hand, pretending like they’ve already finished arms for the day. Jo is too polite to comment on the recent loss of muscle mass, or else she  doesn’t study Andy’s body with the same dysphoric eagle’s eye that Andy does. They correct Jo while she’s in motion, with light touches tucking her elbows in and tapping her tailbone so she tightens her pelvic floor and enlists the core muscles. “One set of 12 reps, then we go up in weight. Three sets or your arms stop working, whatever comes first,” they instruct.

Jo’s face strains and her lips move in a silent count. Satisfied that she’s distracted enough for Andy to tolerate the feeling of vulnerability, they say, “So my mom’s sick.”

Jo’s eyes bulge slightly, but that could very well just be the weights. Andy continues, “Darrell called and told me.” Jo lets out a grunt that Andy is pretty sure has to do with the entity known as Darrell. It’s an appropriate reaction, as far as they’re concerned. “Yeah. So I don’t really know the details. I kind of can’t believe I even picked up the call. I think it was the drugs, I was so disoriented—”

Andy freezes because Jo goes still: not two minutes into their daring emotional disclosure, they’ve already misstepped. Jo sets her weights down, wipes her forehead with the back of her arm, and picks up the 10s. “You making a joke, Hurley?” she asks.

Andy touches her shoulder, brushing it with a few fingertips. “Rest,” they instruct. “You can do crunches between sets.”

“ _Rest_? Crunches are rest now?” Jo makes a big show of her incredulity, but she gets on the ground.

“Your butt looks nice in those shorts,” Andy tells her. Joe flips her off and starts crunching. “Thirty, by the way. You’re doing 30.”

“So anyway,” Andy continues when Jo’s back to red-faced and grunting lightly, “I was on pain meds at the time. Small medical thing. No questions, just crunches,” they cut Jo off when she looks like she’s gonna try to interject. “And I picked up the phone. And it was Darrell. And now I—well, should it matter? Does it matter that she’s sick? She’s hurt me so much, and she’s never gonna see it that way. She’s never gonna say to me _I realize I damaged you in such and such way, and I’m sorry_. I have to do that myself, always. She’s never gonna agree. She’s—she’s never going to comprehend her own role in any of it. I have to be able to validate myself, to know that my experiences are real and I’m allowed to be in pain even if no one else ever thinks so. It’s taken years to learn how to do that, and if I get too close to her, her revisionist history and her self-serving lies, I might lose it. The one piece of ground I’ve found to stand on. And… that makes me scared.”

Jo opens her mouth and Andy figures, if she has lung capacity to spare, she’s not working hard enough. Andy sets a 15lb medicine ball onto her abs, and Jo’s words turn into the universal face for _oof_.

Softer now, some of the agitation draining out of them, Andy goes on, “But then I think—wasn’t she doing her best, even if it was a poor fucking effort? Don’t I owe her—something? Don’t I owe it to her to show up and get hurt, and give her a chance to grow? To have already grown?”

Jo, lips pressed together, crunching away, shakes her head like, _what do you want me to say_ , _lunatic who has forbidden me from speaking_.  

“And then, there’s so much of me that’s tired of carrying things I don’t need anymore. Things that aren’t good for me. I carry so _much_ , and I hold onto things for the wrong reasons. Only, I can’t tell if the thing I don’t need anymore is the same old hurt I’ve carried since childhood, or if it’s her. I’m not sure which I’m supposed to let go of.”

“Thirty!” Jo crows, and leaps to her feet faster than is advisable, given how red-faced she is and how long it’s been since Andy saw her actually do any breathing. She kicks the medicine ball away and gasps huge lungfuls of air.

“That—that’s a lot, An,” Jo starts, puffing. Andy, not sure they can actually tolerate a response, helpfully brings the next size dumbbell over and presses them into Jo’s hands. But Jo sets them down again, and pulls Andy against her sweat-damp t-shirt, hugging her boa constrictor-tight. This is painful: their healing body protests with internal knives. “You’re doing the right thing. Whatever you decide, babe, it’s the right thing.”

Andy pushes Jo away, directing their smile at the floor and pretending Jo’s warmth and tenderness is something they want to shrug off. “Okay, but—which right thing would you do?”

Jo picks up the dumbbells herself. “Find a noisy Jewish cardiologist to adopt me,” she says. “Your goy mom is a nightmare.” Andy opens their mouth to ask a follow-up question, but Jo shushes them. “Shhhhh,” she says. “I’m counting.”

 

 


	9. i need the salt in the wound for another song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which fruit is gay, people get hurt, and it's never a good thing when Pete Wentz gets what she wants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ummmm so as you know, I have been having a rough time. and I think I'm taking it out on the girl out boys. there are so many good things on the horizon, but until then... it's 2008 and the kids aren't alright.
> 
> BUT DON'T WORRY! there are still jokes?
> 
> [music for when you're still in love with someone who's bad for you, music for when your heart believes in love and your brain tells you not to, music for when everybody else feels about you the same shitty way you feel about yourself, music for every night you dream about your ex and every morning you wake up crying](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

The drum pedal is Andy Hurley’s very best friend. Their calves are like, beefy beyond reckoning after so many weeks of Leg and Butt Days. Jo keeps following them to the gym, and they’re getting jealous of her arms. Silver lining: they could stomp the opening bass drum barrage of this Glengarry Glen Ross song all day.

Jo scruffs their stubbly head from behind, making her way over to her guitar stand with a cup of coffee. “Ooh, real drums today?” she asks. Andy told (lied to) Jo and Pat that they’re trying to learn to program the drum machine, just for fun, and that the songwriting process is the perfect time for it. Pat looked suspicious—she could program the drum machine in her sleep, Andy’s never had any interest whatsoever in learning how to do things like this, and it’s hard to get the feel of their songs quite right without the live rawness of Andy’s kit throbbing through the four of them—but sanguine Jo just accepted it.

“Uhhh,” says Andy. They rotate their shoulder blades a little, lift and roll their arms. They trace the pulling feeling through their trapezius and pecs. They jiggle their forearms like an excited T-rex. Nothing obvious protests. There’s no dramatic ripping of flesh or knife-hot stab of pain. The future scars are still livid purple wounds, but the flesh seems knitted and doesn’t leak. How are they supposed to tell? “Maybe?”

Jo’s tuning up one of her three guitars, the Squier with the classic rock ombre of dark wood edges fading to a pale burst around the fretboard. She hums the chorus to herself, her fingers playing over the strings. Andy doesn’t write music, like, ever, but they recognize the look Jo gets on her face when she’s deep in a melody, snipping and tightening and dashing out boldly in an unexpected direction. She brings roughness and realness back in to Pat’s overly technical, overly polished sound. Andy listens to her silly, out-of-tune humming, the way she zips through the part she’s been given and starts cutting it up, casually feeling out places it might be stronger. She does it all like it’s unconscious, like it’s breathing, like nothing is more natural to her than to take a piece of music, feel it from the inside, and understand implicitly all the ways it could be stronger.

Pat enters the studio next. She’s looking a little pale, but she’s got a notebook clamped tight in her hand. “Final lyrics arrangement, hot off the press,” she says. She sounds determined. “If things go well today, we might finally have a song.”

“How many weeks have we been working on this record and we don’t even have one song yet?” Pete asks, entering belly-first and eating out of a bag of campfire marshmallows.

“Judging by the size of that baby bump? Sixteen, seventeen months,” says Andy.

“You can’t rush art, children,” Jo informs them primly. But the truth is they’re all getting tense and frustrated with the way the songs are refusing to come together. The record eludes them. They’ve had so many false leads, demos that turned into hollow bullshit the harder they tried to infuse them with meaning. What they’re trying is getting increasingly over the top. Andy’s watching their friends pour their whole selves in, cheese-grating their hearts raw, and meanwhile the amount of finished work they have keeps shrinking. Meanwhile Andy doesn’t even have the calluses on their hands anymore for drumsticks, and they’re pretending it’s normal and fine that they’re not on their kit helping with this, and it’s only because their friends are so fucking nice that no one’s said out loud, _you’re letting us down_.

Pat passes around the notebook with her jaw clamped unusually tight. In Pat’s bubbly handwriting, Andy reads,

_I will never believe in anything again / Change will come, oh, change will come / I will never believe in anything again_

_Kick drum beating in my chest again / oh, we will never believe again / preach electric to a microphone stand_

_I’m a mascot for what you’ve become / I love the mayhem more than the love_

They do a bit of a double-take. They scan Pat’s face, trying to suss out who these words came from. Pete’s pen, Pat’s arrangement, that’s the usual deal, but it’s never been 100% Pete, not when Pat is the filter and the lens these things come through. She adds things, she edits. She excavates new meaning through juxtaposition. She does the opposite, caving in confessions she doesn’t want to hear. She puts back in lyrics Pete throws out, throws out lyrics Pete keeps putting back in. She stitches together the costume Pete wears. She keeps Pete’s secrets.

“Are you okay?” Andy asks, looking from the page to Pat. Pat scowls and tugs the notebook back from Andy, passes it to Jo.

“‘Course,” Pat says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Uhhh. Do you want me to answer that?” Andy asks.

“I want you to drum,” Pat snips back. The tension’s high, it’s not about Andy, it’s not. Still, they fold a little around the jab. They fit their palms around the worn wood of their favorite sticks.

“Yeah, I can do that,” they say. And they make it true.

 

Pete finds Andy with bags of frozen peas in their armpits, faceup on the grubby floor of the room they’re sharing.

“You okay?” Pete asks.

Wordlessly, Andy pulls their shirt up. The movement hurts, but what they reveal hurts more: the purple slugs below their nipples are puffed-out and angry, shiny with leaking plasma, a brackish green bruise flowering around the scars.

“I think what I did today might count as _pushing it_ ,” says Andy.

They’re not prepared for the flicker of annoyance that crosses Pete’s face. She rests her hands on the fat bump in her Angels & Kings hoodie. Andy needs sympathy and care, and instead they get a furrowed brow.

“You drummed for hours today,” Pete says. “I watched you.”

“Yeah, I’m aware,” says Andy.

“I kept asking you if you wanted to take a break and you told me to stop worrying.”

“Also true.”

Pete breaks out pacing. “Well, fuck, Andy, I trusted you to know your limits and take care of yourself, ‘cause I hate it when people don’t trust me to do that, and—and you _hurt_ yourself!”

Andy doesn’t like the direction this is going at all. “I was just trying—”

“You could have stopped after we got Coffee’s for Closers down! You only needed to play through it once or twice for the actual recording, you’re always fucking first-take perfect! Like, what the fuck, dude? How am I supposed to support you if you’re gonna endanger your damn life?”

Andy’s eyes narrow to viper slits. “I don’t know, you could try _actually supporting me_ ,” they throw back. “Like, whether you agree with my behavior or not. You could try not being an asshole about this, and help me instead. I didn’t endanger my _life_.”

“Oh yeah? Should I call Dr. Rassi and ask what he thinks?”

“I’m not a _child_!” Andy’s surprised as anyone to hear themself yell. “I have been dealing with this shit on my own my entire life! I made one fucking mistake and I obviously know it, I don’t need you _yelling_ at me about it!”

Pete’s mouth thins out into this square shape that always means trouble. The heat drops out of her voice, and a dangerous calm replaces it. “‘On your own your entire life,’” she repeats in her serial killer voice.

“Shit, Pete. Don’t.”

“No, just, I think that’s an interesting choice of words, given how hard I’ve been fighting to take care of you, to be there with you and for you, for, you know, nearly a fucking decade. Given that you’re the family I chose for myself. Given that I thought I was that for you.”

Andy closes their eyes against the tears that are threatening to leak out. They adjust their shitty melting peas. “My mom never believed me when I was sick,” they say, and they are so fucking tired of explaining their behavior with _my mom this_ and _my childhood that_ , but it always comes back to the same damn things somehow. “Believed that lying in bed being quiet could cure anything, and if I ever let myself get so sick I needed a doctor, it was this big guilt trip. Medicine cost too much, following up with specialists was a scam, further tests probably wouldn’t show anything, doctor’s recommendations were too hard to follow, and I was probably exaggerating the symptoms anyway. I just got used to doing it alone, okay? Asking for help is hard. Stopping when it hurts—fuck, if I stopped when something hurt, I’d never do anything. I wouldn’t be alive. Of course you’re my family. You and the band, you’re everything to me. I just feel—I feel selfish. I feel guilty. Like if I hadn’t insisted on getting this surgery when I _knew_ we had to write a record, things would be going better in the studio. Like I’m not pulling my weight and that’s why things aren’t working. And I don’t want to let down my—my only family.”  

Stopping the tears is a lost cause at this point. Their cheeks are running wet by the time they blink their eyes open to look at Pete. Her face is screwed up with sorrow too, a twin of Andy’s own. Awkwardly, she lowers herself to the floor, kneels beside Andy, strokes their stomach in a weird gesture of comfort.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Pete says. “I shouldn’t have—”

“No, I’m the one who shouldn’t have—”

“Shut up and let me apologize!” Pete laughs while she cries. “Your chest looks really gnarly right now, and it scared me. The complications your doctor warned me about scare the _shit_ out of me. And I always want to fight whatever’s hurting you, even when it _is_ you. I’m sorry I yelled, that was out of line. I want you to come to me for help and not worry that I’ll judge you. Just—it would really help me out if you weren’t a stoical idiot about this. Okay?”

Andy is laughing too, despite the tears still leaking down their face. “Did you just call me an idiot in your apology?”

“I mean, are you being an idiot in the situation I’m apologizing for?”

“Oh my god, why do I even talk to you,” Andy laughs, pulling Pete into a hug that hurts like hell, all through their shoulders and sides. Pete’s tears pool on their bare chest and Andy realizes this is the first bare-chested hug of their adult life, outside of the embraces shared with lovers.

*

This morning Pat woke up next to Pete Wentz, the coconut and lavender smell of her hair and face products, the warm muzziness of her sleep-heavy body familiar on a molecular level. Waking is the most dangerous moment of Pat’s day, because deep in the heart of her, she still belongs to Pete. Each day she has to open her eyes and rediscover her loss and heartbreak all over again. Whatever seconds stretch between the waking and the remembering become a barometer for the day’s difficulty, the day’s pain.

This morning, waking next to Pete, there was a long lag in remembering.

Home is not a place but a process. Home is this girl in a bed.

Home is waking up with two heads pressed to one pillow, one earbud for each girl, the sounds of their demo suspended between them. They must have fallen asleep this way, listening to their own work spiral and loop, rising and falling, trying to find the feeling.

Pat scrambled out of the bed violently, and only the fatigue of pregnancy kept Pete from waking. But leaping off a mattress didn’t dislodge the thing she felt, the peace and wholeness that spread through her center in those few half-asleep moments of forgetting. Of going home.

So now, in the studio, Pat’s hands drop dumbly on the electronic keyboard with an unmusical crash when huge pregnant Pete tears a nectarine in half with her hands. Translucent orange stickiness runs into her hands, and she slurps juice from her fingers. Her tongue swipes along her wedding band, gathering up drops of sweetness. As if what she’s doing isn’t _completely obscene_ , Pete offers the other half of the fruit to Pat.

“Nectarine?” she asks, sucking at her palm. Pat’s having a hard time keeping her mouth from sagging open in pure, stupid lust. Pete pregnant, Pete light with happiness, Pete writing songs and growing life. Pete eating stone fruit. Living with Pete again, kind of, for the first time since they split. Getting along like this. Waking up in the same bed. It’s—it’s all having an effect. A rather strong effect.

Is it suddenly hot in here? Like. Really abruptly hot? Perhaps people should take Nelly’s time-honored advice and start taking their clothes off? Pete holds out the torn, glistening fruit and Pat takes it helplessly. She fits it to her lips, the soft firm skin reminding her of other things. Pete’s watching her. The nectarine smells fresh-tangy-sweet, but when she bites into it, all she tastes is Pete.

The knock on the studio door is so startling Pat chokes. Nectarine flesh flies out of her mouth and lands unsexily on the keyboard. Pete starts laughing so hard she snorts, juice on her chin, and whatever sexual nectarine tension was building is completely shattered. Which is for the best, because the door cracks open, and Vicky T sticks her head inside.

Pat swallows painfully. Her girlfriend is the last person she’s expecting to see. They’ve had a few strained phone calls since she got to LA, but if she’s being honest, Pat’s heart isn’t in it. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. Vicky’s perfect: sweet, smart, funny, talented, hot, not married, actually into Pat. But for some reason, these days a nectarine can make her tremble while a call from her girlfriend fills her with dread. Pat’s heart hates her. It’s actively trying to ruin her life. She’s trying her fucking hardest to listen to her brain instead.

Using her brain, then, instead of _any other part of her anatomy_ , Pat runs across the room. She pulls Vicky into her arms, squealing, “What are you doing here?” with excitement and not accusation. She kisses her girlfriend, stomps down on the protests from her backstabbing heart, and doesn’t think about fruit at all.

*

All Pete is trying to do is her fucking laundry.

_Clearly_ they’re not gonna get any _work_ done, now that Pat’s girlfriend is here, so she might as well have clean undies. It’s not like Pete wouldn’t like to have visitors, or to go home every now and then and spend the night with her _husband_ —it’s that Pete respects the _process_ , respects what they’re trying to do here, the artistic _purity_ of a creative retreat. She feels her baby shift under her skin, the daughter-fish swimming, always so quick to rouse to Pete’s agitation. She’s got a temper, this creature blooming inside Pete. Pete smoothes her belly with one hand and flings dirty t-shirts and embarrassingly stretchy pants into the washing machine, muttering dark annoyances to her little fish.

“Just want to get through this fucking album before I get too fat to hold a fucking bass. Fingers are already so fucking swollen I can barely play, and let’s be real, I wasn’t gonna win any technical bass awards as it was. Now with this unannounced _interruption_ —”

Exactly like she’s been summoned, so uncannily that Pete wonders if this is a Beetlejuice situation, Vicky T appears in the creepy little laundry room in the basement of Oakwood. “Who ya talking to?” she asks, bright and friendly, and Pete’s unmitigated scowl wipes the cheer right off her face. “Is this a bad time?” Vicky adds.

“A little late to ask that, isn’t it?” Pete’s being petulant and she doesn’t care. It’s exhausting being on her best behavior all the time. She didn’t ask to get knocked up, really she didn’t. All she wanted to do was take her meds by the handful, get drunk and indiscreet in the streets of Los Angeles, slide her hands up a few skirts, get in a few fistfights, make mistakes, fall in love a few hundred thousand times—just generally enjoy the notoriety she’s earned on a fucking unimaginably large scale. Get over her heartbreak in the usual way. Pete’s always been the kind of girl who solves her problems by self-destructing, and lately, she’s not even allowed to do that. Lately it’s prenatal vitamins, folic acid and kale, marriage vows, respectable bedtimes. She’s fucking sick of it. She’s been trying like hell to do the right thing, to be a better person, and it’s just now occurring to her that if she’s gonna feel like shit either way, what’s the goddamn point? If she’s lost the love of her life either way. What the fuck good is a white picket fence and a happily ever after? This isn’t her story. It’s like she woke up on the wrong side of reality.

“Umm,” Vicky hums. She hovers uncomfortably in the entrance. “I almost don’t want to ask, but. Is it a problem for you that I’m here?”

“In this laundry room? Yes,” Pete snaps. “I was having a conversation with the man cub.” She gestures to the baby bump, as if that makes her sound any less insane right now.

Instead of listening to the survival instincts that are _surely_ encouraging her to run in the opposite direction, Vicky T steps further into the room. She leans against the edge of the dryer and draws a bracing breath. “I mean, is it a problem for you that I’m in Los Angeles. Is it a problem for you… that I’m with Pat.”

Pete slops laundry soap all over the top of the washing machine, she pours it so aggressively. She doesn’t bother with the fucking measuring cup. If the washing machine bubbles over and floods this whole complex, _so be it_. “No, it’s great,” she lies through clenched teeth. “I think it’s great.”

Vicky crosses her arms over her flat midriff and Pete feels a wild, insensible stab of envy. Her body is already so stretchmarked and strained she barely recognizes it. What will another four months and then _delivering a child_ do to it? Vicky, young and lithe and sexy and not even supposed to be here, is too much to deal with.

“So obviously that wasn’t very convincing,” Vicky says. “You know that, right?”

Pete slams the lid of the washer and twists the dial to start it like she’s trying to twist someone’s head off. “I don’t know why you came here or what the fuck you want from me right now, Vicky,” Pete bites out, “but like I said, _this isn’t a great time_.”

“I actually thought you’d be happy to see me. You’ve always been such a good friend, such a supportive mentor. I know recording’s been difficult and I thought coming out to surprise Pat and support my favorite girls… I actually thought that was kind of a cool thing to do.”

Pete is not at all interested in the hurt flooding Vicky’s pretty eyes. She sticks her chin out, crosses her arms over her suddenly melon-shaped body—like she’s got two cantaloupes and a watermelon stuffed down her shirt at any given moment, it’s unwieldy and her back is _always_ sore—and just stares at the other girl. She’s not afraid of having a fucking drawn-pistols-at-sundown standoff in this laundry room. Right now she doesn’t feel afraid of anything.

“Wow, okay. Okay.” Vicky puts her palms up, like she thinks she’s innocent. “Obviously I was wrong. I’ll keep out of your way while I’m in town.”

Pete doesn’t break until Vicky’s out the door and nearly out of sight. _Fuck_. “Vicky?” she calls. The girl spins back around with an eagerness for approval that’s heartbreaking.  

“Yeah?”

It costs Pete more than she can afford to say what’s true in this moment. But she says it anyway: “I really do think it’s great. That you have each other.”

“Me too,” Vicky says. And at least one of them is learning, because she leaves after that, and she doesn’t look back. She doesn’t see Pete slumped against the fucking laundry machines, crying as quietly as she can, five months pregnant wearing a wedding band. Just one constellation in an entire galaxy of things other people never see.

*

Jo Trohman is a big believer in conflict.

Seriously: nothing good has ever happened to her as a result of avoiding saying what she feels, asking for what she needs, or doing what needs to be done. Avoiding conflict is a great way to end up suckered into a situation that hurts you in every way, and feeling like you don’t have the power or even the right to get out of it. Avoiding conflict is a great way to make sure that whatever you want and need, you don’t get. Jo’s never backed down from a fight in her life, and she’s never said sorry when she wasn’t. She doesn’t apologize for things that are other people’s fault. She doesn’t pretend not to have reactions to things that upset her. She doesn’t try to make those reactions go away for the comfort of the people around her.

And honestly? Jo thinks she has a pretty good life.

But god, oh god, none of that means she wants to be in the room while somebody else practices conflict.

Tonight after another frustrating day in the studio, Pat screaming _I don’t care what you think as long as it’s about me_ into her mic and Andy not drumming and everyone drifting out of sync and out of key without Andy’s anchor, the four of them plus Vicky cram into one small room to watch a movie. You wouldn’t think that watching Michael Bay’s _Transformers_ on a small TV screen would be a situation rife with emotional tension, but you would be wrong. Jo and Andy start out throwing popcorn at the screen, laughing and joking normally, until the crowded agony in the room grows thick as a thornbush and chokes the merriment out. Some kind of Bermuda triangle has opened up between Pete and Pat and Vicky, and all joy that ventures near it becomes hopelessly lost. Jo feels like Amelia Earhart flying into a storm.

Out of the blue Pete says, “I should kiss a Kardashian in our next video. Commentary on fame and the objectification of love between women, you know.” Pat turns six different colors, all of which are probably shades of _you couldn’t be caught kissing me in public but you’ll do it on camera with a Kardashian?_

“Which one, and can it be me instead?” Andy asks. “You’re kind of, you know. Enormously pregnant and not really the coy sex object you once were.”

“And you are?” Pete demands.

“I could be!”

“Pete’s also married,” Vicky T points out in a tight voice. “Which _I’m pretty sure_ means kissing other people is out.”

“You don’t get to decide what is and isn’t on the table in my marriage,” Pete says. Her voice is so cold that Jo actually laughs, thinking she’s playing, but her laugh dies in the air when there’s no punchline.

“Well, I still want to be the hot new sex object of the band,” Andy says, trying to revive the moment.

“You’ll always be a sex object to me,” says Jo. No one laughs.

The tension only mounts from there. Pat and Vicky barely look at each other, barely touch, despite the fact that Vicky flew across the entire country to be here. They’re not even sitting together: Vicky’s on the couch with Pete, and Pat’s sitting on the floor next to Jo. Actually, now that Jo thinks about it, it’s really weird that Pat’s girlfriend flew across the entire country to be here for just two nights, and Pat’s spending them watching a rental copy of _Transformers_ on the floor of a shitty apartment with three people she’s been squabbling with for weeks. Pete, whose commentary turns increasingly icy at the movie goes on, is not helping matters.

At some point, Megan Fox does something heroic in a low-cut top and Pat makes an appreciative sound; both Pete and Vicky glare at her. Vicky says, “She _looks_ like your type,” in a voice clearly meant to be cutting.

“I think she’s everyone’s type,” Andy says, still trying to defuse whatever confusing thing is happening in this room.

“Confirmed by the token heterosexual,” Jo agrees. But the reward for their attempt at levity is just that three sets of narrowed eyes land on them. Jo lifts up Andy’s arm and presses herself under it, attempting to hide, but as soon as she makes contact with Andy’s side, they wince away. Jo feels a deep sting of rejection and is even less sure of what’s happening, here.

Everyone is obviously uncomfortable, and the movie is bad anyway, so Jo fakes a huge yawn and says, “Wow, I’m beat. Do you guys want to shut this off and go to bed?”

“What? No, I want to see the end,” says Pat. Jo’s eyes bug out of her head as she turns to look at her friend. Psychically, Jo tries to convey the message, _Are you fucking insane? I’m trying to get you out of this situation_. Pat’s eyes bulge too and she beams back something that seems like, _Once this movie ends I have to be alone with my girlfriend_. Which honestly, Jo understands why she wouldn’t want to do right now. Jo puts her hand over Pat’s on the disgusting carpet and squeezes it, but then Pat looks at her like she’s a freak. Jo crosses her arms over her chest and slumps back against the couch she’s leaning on. Apparently everybody’s really into their personal space tonight. Which is _fine_ , Jo’s _fine_ about it.

So all in all, it’s a rotten night. Jo thinks it’s over when the movie finally ends and she goes back to her own room, but then Pat and Vicky follow. Of course they do. Jo lays awake all night, her pillow smashed over her head, trying desperately not to eavesdrop on their whisper-fight. She’s listened to Pat have sex way too close to where Jo’s trying to sleep plenty of times in her life, always a loud and memorable experience, and honestly? Honestly, she knows how to cope with that. Whereas the sound of a relationship falling apart in the bed next to hers—

For the first time ever, Jo wishes she could just overhear Pat fuck.

*

“So—you’ll call me?”

“I said I will, didn’t I?”

“Just. I feel like—leaving like this feels really bad, baby. I just. What? What’s going through your head right now? You have a look on your face.”

“I guess I’m wondering… Are we just forcing this?”

“What do you mean, forcing it?”

“Hold on, wait, let me think so I can say it right. Don’t—stop panicking. Let me think.”

“I’m trying so hard to be good to you, Pat. I’m trying so hard to be a good girlfriend. I don’t understand why—”

“That’s it, that’s what I’m feeling. Are we supposed to be trying so hard? Or are we just trying to stuff love into something that doesn’t fit?”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry. I just—”

“No, it’s interesting. What you said. Because, um. I didn’t know you were even trying to love me? You’ve never said it.”

“Vee…”

“I don’t want someone who has to _try_ to be in love with me. I want someone who just _is_.”

“You deserve that.”

“I spent high school listening you guys. Watching your videos on MTV. Watching the way you and Pete were with each other. I saw—that Halloween show, a billion years ago. I saw a bootleg video of that once. I saw you kiss her onstage, and. The way you were always watching her. The way looks burned between you, even through a television screen. I want _that_ , Patty. I want to be loved like that.”

“Your flight leaves in—”

“I know. My cab’s outside. I’m going.”

“Vee.”

“Pat?”

“I will.”

“Love me?”

“Call you. I meant—shit. I promise I’ll call you.”

“I’m gonna go. For the record—for the record, this fucking sucks.”

“Yeah. For me too.”

“Goodbye, Pat.”

“Bye, Vicks. Um—safe travels.”

“Sure. Bye.”

Pete, wearing only a swimsuit and feeling like a mid-sized planet in it, barely leaps back into her own room and out of the hallway in time. She didn’t mean to eavesdrop—she was rotten to Vicky, she just wants to avoid her, she was just trying to make sure Vicky wasn’t in the room before she went in looking for Jo.

But she’s heard it now.

She peeks through the crack in her door to watch Vicky and her suitcase disappear down the hallway. She should wait a few minutes before she goes over, it’s the only decent thing to do. She knows this. But—maybe Pat wants to swim with her. Like, as a friendly distraction from whatever nuclear event _that_ goodbye was. It has nothing to do with how Pete’s giant new tits look in this swim top. Maybe the best way to proceed in this situation is to act like she never heard anything and just do what she was gonna do anyway. That makes sense. Right?

Pete’s letting herself in before she’s even made up her mind. “Hey, Patster!” she says with too much enthusiasm. “I’m heading to the pool, want to come?”

Pat’s eyes are red and angry. There’s nothing more dear to Pete than the way she looks a bit like a shiny-faced weasel when she’s trying not to cry. “Now’s not a good time,” she says, her voice thick.

“Oh, babe,” Pete says, all open posture and innocence. “What happened? What can I do?”

And like a self-satisfied vulture, she swoops in.

 


	10. only love hurts like this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pete and Pat sneak out together, moms get involved, and the girls slip into a madness of two.
> 
>  
> 
> [the longest playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4%22)

****

 

**friendsorenemies.com**

_August 9, 2008_

**some of these things have wings….the rest are just caterpillars**

my mind is a safe, right? the only place to lock away the only things i treasure where they’ll be hidden from me, a dirty, shitty girl with newsprint stains over her fingerprints. safe means protected, cant-be-ruined. safe means peteproof.

you know the saying _you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone_? what about the reverse of that. what about, you don’t know what was missing til you have it. cuz how do you find a hole in the heart? the rot at the core. you don’t notice that yr holey  & full of worms if you’re the only apple you’ve ever seen. you just think apples are like that. maybe. maybe not.

i am full in ways i haven’t ever been. i’m the girl with the most cake. im having it all & any headline will tell you so.

so why do i feel like there’s a hole where something was? buzz, buzz, buzz. doc, i’ve got butterflies, but it might be they mean to be stitches. im coming apart at the seams: sew me up. im a stitch come loose. stuffing you can see in the dark. vows & altars, id promise you anything for another shot at life.

perfect girl with your perfect life. nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy. used to say i wanted hell or glory & nothing in between. now i am the in between. there’s an egg turning over inside me. soon she’ll hatch. i hope she looks like you. or do i hope she looks like me?

u can stop sending hate mail now. ive gotten it all. it seeps through the ether & i drink it in the water. i know i married someone you wanted to marry instead. i know i used to be someone you wanted to marry instead. but you dont have to be so loud about it. im about to be somebody’s mother, you know. i was a daughter too. lower yr voices. it hurts the same if you whisper, i swear.

anyway. you can tell that boy ill leave you alone now. like a stove, ill turn my love down.

which is it? the girl who writes the songs or the one who’s in them?

pat’s outside the door (let her in). we’re going to a show tonight, los angeles. shhhh. dont tell. we can be each others secret.

hollywood is a good story. but best friends are better. sleepovers are just as good as they were 10 years ago. give me that over-the-counter love: you’ve got me addicted to this.

\- xo

 

_Tags: pete wentz, lyrics or not, notes from the recording studio, secret ska show sneak out_

_Posted by peterpanisafraud on 08/09/2008 8:26 PM_

*

Pat’s mom won’t stop asking about Victoria.

“When am I going to meet this mystery girl?” she’s pestering now. Pat’s got one ear and half a brain pressed to the phone. The rest of herself is glued to her laptop. She’s tweaking compositions based on memory and heartbeat, since her mom will know she’s multi-tasking if she lets her songs play out loud. She’s supposed to be sneaking out with Pete in about ten minutes, a hair-brained scheme if she’s ever heard one, but it’s not like she even tried to refuse.

“She’s not a mystery girl, Mom,” Pat says. She may be 24, but when she talks to her mom she sounds exactly like a 16 year old. “She’s my girlfriend, her name is Vicky, I’ve told you all about her.”

“All I’ve seen of her is that _lovely_ picture of your middle finger. Do you know how many of my coworkers brought that picture to me? Because the answer is _several_. A mother has a right to be curious!”

“And a daughter has a right to some privacy,” Pat mumbles. She just wants to get this song out of her head the right way before she goes out with Pete and fills herself up with new sounds and confusing Pete-feelings. She usually avoids all non-Fall Out Boy music while she’s writing. She’s kind of fanatical about it, actually. She doesn’t know why she let Pete talk her into this. She knows exactly why she let Pete talk her into this. Splitting her attention makes her irritable, so she lets a little bite into her voice as she says, “Listen, I don’t know how much longer we’re gonna be together, if you want me to be honest. So—ease up, maybe.”

“Oh honey! What’s going on?”

There’s entirely too much coo and sympathy in her mother’s voice right now. Every emotion-phobic cell of Pat’s being screams _shut it down_. She is 3000% not having this conversation with her mother, now or ever. They aren’t that kind of family. Pat’s parents were good about it, when she came out—they outperformed expectations of middle class white Midwestern parents—but still, it’s never been comfy enough for Pat to want to dish about the details of her lesbian love life. The way her mom and sister complain openly and endlessly about the minutiae of their relationships with men kind of horrifies her. Maybe it’s from dating girls, but Pat honestly can’t imagine having conversations like that _about_ and not _with_ her partner.

“Ma, I’m about to go out with Pete,” Pat changes the subject. “I’ve gotta wrap up and get off the phone, okay?”

“Now Pete was a girlfriend I liked,” Pat’s mom says. She says this constantly. “The best person you ever brought home.”

“You do know you’re the only person with access to Western media who’s ever used those words to describe Pete, right?”

“I don’t care one bit about what they say about her in trashy supermarket magazines!” Pat’s mom is always quick to leap to Pete’s defense. This is something they can agree on. “The whole world is jealous of her, that’s why they’re so mean. I liked how you were with her, Pat. Even when she was… going through her troubles. I wish you two had stuck together.”

Pat suppresses a sigh, the question of _which time, which troubles_. Because being with Pete wasn’t, like, puppies and rainbows. It was a parking lot phone call and a ten-day stay in the hospital and gathering up sharps, checking her arms for new scars, checking her breath for booze before letting her into cars. It was hickeys on her neck that Pete couldn’t trace the origin of, it was the whole world wanting to fuck her and Pete playing along. It was her phone hacked and pictures sent to Pat on the internet for everyone to see, Pete’s body broken open like bread and fed to the masses, and the whole time she’s reeling with the trauma and paranoia she’s asking Pat, _but are they gonna leak our conversations, are they gonna know i sent the pictures to_ you _, are they gonna find out about us, they can’t find out_. It was the sick girl always medicated too much or not enough and the puppy dog girl trying desperately to make herself medicine. It was secrets and mood swings and devastating fights, fights that started with a single song or show and ended up feeling like the world cracking in half, like any argument could lead to losing Pete forever. Like Pat wouldn’t survive it if she did.

So was it the best relationship she’s ever had, the happiest she’s ever felt, the closest to another human being Pat has ever been? Does it even matter? They were kids. They barely knew how to communicate, and then they got famous. It was a fucking rollercoaster. Pat’s still dealing with the emotional whiplash.

“Oh, we’re definitely stuck together. There’s no getting rid of her now,” Pat says. Exhausted all at once, she closes her laptop lid and lets the song lie. Either she got it, or it’s gone. “This kind of thing is why I don’t want to introduce you to my current girlfriend, by the way,” Pat adds. “The Pete monologues have got to stop if I’m ever gonna bring anyone else home.”

“Bring home someone better than Pete and I’ll see what I can do,” her mom jokes.

“Aaaand that’s my cue to end this conversation,” Pat tells her. She has this nervous twist in her belly about going out with Pete tonight. She’s not sure why, she just feels something that sort of _crackles_ about the invitation. “Talk to you later, Mom. Love you.”

 

Pat goes next door. She knocks on Pete’s door instead of just barging in, imbued with a strange sense of boundaries after trying to explain her life to her mother, even briefly. For a long time, she and Pete were default roomies wherever there was more than one room. They’re messiest, for one thing; but mostly it was that they’d end up in the same bed even if they started in separate ones. They shared a bed for years: in the little apartment on Roscoe Street, in the bigger place they rented just the two of them after Pete’s Incident with the Atavan, on buses when they had one, on bench seats when they only had Jo’s van. That they belonged together, a matched set, used to be an unspoken rule of band operations. It still is, kind of: even their heartbreak is twinned.

Learning to knock has been a process of pausing. The feeling of held breath or the space between heartbeats, a hesitation so deep it settles into her biology. Fibrous and wending with marrow. A permanent disconnect in the one place she thought she’d never fracture.

So it’s a knock, and it’s more than that. Their history piles up around them like dead leaves and shed skins. Pat doesn’t breathe again til Pete answers. The door swings and there she is, her belly like a Magic 8 ball in a clinging black dress, her height boosted by metallic silver platform Oxfords.

Pete kisses Pat on the cheek like they didn’t just spend all day together, says, “You’re wearing your fisherman sweater.”

Pat twitches the droopy hem of her big knit sweater, worn over shorts to balance the late night chill of Hollywood with the heat of summer. “This is a different sweater,” she protests. “You can’t describe all my clothes as nautical.”

“Well, why does your entire wardrobe make you look like a sea captain? Am I supposed to lie about this? I feel like I should train a seagull to ride around on your shoulder,” Pete teases. She uses the mirror on the back of the door to spread on this particular shade of purple-brown lipstick that makes her look simultaneously glamorous and as if she’s been drinking old blood. “Okay, ready.”

She veers in to stain Pat’s cheek with another kiss; Pat just barely dodges, complaining, “You’re a menace.”

The bouncer at the dive bar doesn’t even blink at their famous faces. Pat is used to this, can usually fly under the radar; when she does get recognized, it’s usually by queer kids who’ve decided she’s a hero. Pete, though, blinks startled, pulling out of her expected wince, and if Pat knows her—and Pat does—she’s probably feeling a complicated shade of relief and disappointment. The bouncer hands their IDs back blank-faced, and then they’re in the dark sweaty closeness of the club.

It’s been ages since Pat’s been in a club this size, and it immediately transports her back in time to her junior year of high school, when shitty clubs were her holy places. Pete vanishes to the bar and returns with two ominously neon shots.

“To our night out,” she toasts.

Pat plucks the shooters out of Pete’s hand, protests, “Dude, you can’t drink this.”

Pete bares teeth like a wolf. “Drat,” she says with zero remorse. “Guess you’ll have to do them both.”

It’s a setup, and Pat walked right into it. Rolling her eyes, she knocks back one shot and then the other: sour watermelon and vile. “Disgusting,” she says, but Pete pretends not to hear her over the noise, and drags her deeper into the club.

By the time the headliners come on, Pat’s six shots deep, sabotaged by Pete’s ‘oh, silly me, I keep ordering two shots out of habit’ routine. She’s pressed against the barrier and Pete, drunk and fucking _hype_ for some ska music, which is a feeling she has maybe never experienced before today. The music feels good, deep in the core of her body, and the press of other people so close and loud lights her up in places she’s been dormant since tour. Then the horns start, and Pat loses her mind. There’s nothing to do but dance.

 

Sweaty and flushed, drunk on adrenaline and shots she stopped counting, Pat spills onto the streets of Burbank in a manner that could fairly be called ‘staggering.’ Pete clutches onto her arm, laughing so hard she can’t stand up straight.

“You’re the sober one! Pull yourself together!” Pat demands, but this makes Pete laugh even harder. She doubles over and in slow-motion the two of them sink to the curb. Pete’s wiping tears from her eyes, glitter and eyeliner everywhere, and Pat’s got upbeats echoing in her brain too loud for thoughts. Her mouth goes rogue to say, “You laugh like light’s pouring out of you. You’re so fucking pretty. You’re incandescent.” Pete blinks at her, her face open and somehow hopeful.

“I do make a pretty hot pregnant chick,” she says. The corner of her lips curl, ready to turn it into a joke should Pat disagree, and it is that flicker of softness, that sea cucumber style of self-defense where she’ll eviscerate herself before anyone else can, give up her actual organs to protect what’s precious, that Pat loves more than any other thing about her.

On a curb outside a shitty club in Hollywood, under a bright moon and light-bleached stars, drunk and stupid and lit up from the inside, Pat leans in and kisses that curl on the edge of Pete’s mouth. With a soft sound like caving in, Pete turns her head just enough to catch Pat’s kiss and return it. Concrete bites into the palms of Pat’s hands and she leans in heavy, pouring every part of herself into this dark-alley, bad-idea kiss.

*

Jo takes one look at Pat’s purple-smeared mouth and drunk-dreamy eyes and pulls out her laptop to send an email to Ian.

_Ian—_

_Attached some mp3s of this sound I’ve been working with. I’m thinking classic rock-inflected metal? anyway I don’t think I’ll be using this stuff for Fall Out Boy, and I’m writing songs for world domination over here. Think we can use them for the side project we’ve been talking about?_

_—Jo_

She presses _send_ just as Pat flings her limp body onto the mattress behind her. She’s humming something very peppy, which Jo quickly determines is obnoxious. It’s possible the lipstick isn’t Pete’s, Jo tries to tell herself, because the thing uncoiling in her breast is an ugly snarl. Pat could have been kissing anyone. Pat, who has a girlfriend, could have been kissing any random lipsticked girl at that show.

Jo doesn’t believe it for a second. Pat’s mouth is purple, and that means she was kissing Pete, and that means Jo’s about to become irrelevant again. To the writing process, to two of her best friends in the world, to every interviewer on the planet, to the creative identity of _her fucking band_.

“What are you up to, JoJo?” Pat asks in this lovey, best-of-all-possible-worlds voice. It makes Jo want to fight.

“You’re drunk,” Jo says, like maybe this will help her find some compassion for this girl she’s spent the last year putting back together.

“Very,” Pat agrees. She rolls onto her back like a cat in a sunbeam, smiling, smiling.

“You have lipstick all over your face,” Jo says next. There’s a part of herself she’s never held back, a part she’s always allowed to strike. That’s the part of her speaking now. She feels flooded with spite. Pat’s hand flies to her mouth, her eyes going wide. “Yeah, purple’s not a very subtle color,” Jo spits. “Classic Pete.”

“It’s—I—”

“Spare me.” Jo’s voice is caustic. “Go be deliriously pleased with yourself on your own bed. I have work to do.” Jo stuffs her hair under the band of her headphones, glowering furiously, as Pat takes her Disney-animal-sidekick eyes and woundedness and retreats behind the half-wall to her pull-out bed. Jo waits til she’s out of sight before she lets bitter, jealous tears begin to leak out of her eyes. Crying will make her puffy, give her a headache, make her feel worse. She scrubs at the tears with anger, stupid pointless anger that won’t accomplish anything. Fuck writing songs, fuck Fall Out Boy, fuck these people who are supposed to be her friends. All Jo wants in the world is to get so fucking high that none of it’s real.

 

Fuck if the album doesn’t start coming together after that.

Jo watches them, stabbing at the soundboard in the background—where she’d better get used to being, if these two are veering back into their magnetic car crash habits—and feels bitterness like a bird bone stuck in her heart. Their heads tip together, Pete being earnest and Pat laughing softly, and the songs are bursting out of them now, and Jo hates most of all how good it’s sounding. She’s watching them, muttering to herself and dropping heavier and heavier guitar riffs into one of the developing songs, when Andy comes up and hands Jo their cell phone. Their lips are thin and tight, and Jo’s not sure what’s going on with them these days, Jo feels cut off from everyone. They’ve been working out together, but Andy won’t touch her, goes stiff and freezes whenever Jo smacks their shoulder or leans into their space. Andy’s not drumming and Jo doesn’t know why, and Jo glimpsed them coming out of the bathroom the other day with what looked like a bandage around their middle. Jo hopes they aren’t binding with bandages again; they haven’t done that for years. Well, not to Jo’s knowledge, anyway. But why would she assume she knows anything about her friends?

Jo keeps remembering the wedding, when Andy asked her to dance. They are outrageous together on a dance floor, always have been. Mark was there somewhere, Jo’s estranged date, but it was with Andy she pinwheeled around the backyard, spinning under lights, Jo flushed with beer and love, and it felt like anything might happen. Til Pat became a national emergency, and Jo tasked Andy with keeping tabs on Pete, and the night ended with Andy still owing her a slow dance, and—

And it’s not important. It’s not important and Jo’s not thinking about it. She just doesn’t understand why a friend who’s braided her hair and cuddled with her for nearly a decade keeps flinching away from her touch. Why it feels like Andy’s keeping secrets. She doesn’t understand her own reaction to it. She doesn’t understand _anything_ , except that Pete and Pat are literally fucking with _the fate of the band_ , and she’s so mad about it, she’s fucking _done_.

Jo takes the phone from Andy’s hand and sees her friend is shaking, the tension of an overdrawn thread, about to snap. “Don’t let me have that back no matter what I say to you,” Andy says grimly.

Jo stuffs the phone into her back pocket, the grumpy cloud over her dissipating just a little. “Are you Andy from the future? Is this a Sarah Connor situation?”

Andy’s mouth twists into a smile they try to hide. “Josephine, if I was a Terminator sent back in time to destroy the human race, do you think I’d just tell you?”

“If you’re a Terminator you _have_ to tell me. Otherwise it’s entrapment. I don’t make the rules.” Jo shrugs, creating casual space for Andy to speak into. The harder you try to pull truths out of Andy, the more evasive they become. Andy can make themself a void, a perfect absence, if they think you’re looking at them too hard. Jo sees them most clearly out of the corner of her eye.

“Okay, I _am_ a Terminator,” Andy cops. “But the reason I need you to take my phone is because my mother just called me, and there’s a voicemail, and I—I—”

Jo ignores every sign they’ve gotten the last few weeks about Andy’s increased need for personal space. She grabs her friend in a hug and presses her face into their collarbone. “Did you listen to it? Are you okay? I will hit a middle-aged lady, no hesitation. Just say the word, I’ll make you a necklace of her teeth.”

Andy lets out a half-muffled cry of pain and physically removes Jo from their torso. Their eyes are pinpricked with tears that glitter like paste diamonds.

“Why can’t I touch you anymore?” Jo asks before she can think better of it, before she can acknowledge Andy’s going through something emotionally huge and asking for her support, before she can consider any explanation besides rejection. She just feels a flash of pain and responds. “I just—” Her hand hovers between them, reaching for Andy’s chest and then withdrawing. “I miss _hugging_ you.”

Andy, still holding Jo by the shoulders, has a look of deep regret on their face. “I had surgery, babe,” they say. “Top surgery. Um. I’m—still recovering. Drumming the other day, that fucked me up. I’m a little tender, and I didn’t want you to feel—how I’m different.” They stop, start again. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

No one’s more surprised than Jo when she just starts bawling.

*

Andy listens to the voicemail in the bathroom of a dive bar not far from Oakwood. They didn’t want to be alone so much as anonymous. Existing in a crowd of people, unremarkable, with no history and no past. The emotional accountability of long-term relationships is impossible tonight. They can’t carry it. After carrying so much for so long, right now, the weight of their own life is beyond them.

“I shouldn’t be surprised you didn’t call,” their mother’s voice, tear-stretched and angry, fills the single stall bathroom. “After everything I gave you, after everything I poured into you… Even as a child you were ungrateful.”

Andy’s fist convulses at their side. They lean their forehead against the bathroom wall and take a long, slow breath. A lifetime of invalidation, gaslighting, and emotional isolation is hard to shake. Their anger is a quick thing, and only in anger do they have the ability to say _I’m worth more, I deserve more, this is injust_. When the anger drains away, all they’re left with is _what if she’s right?_

She’s not done. Even recorded, she haunts Andy’s bones and heart. “The medical bills are—well, I hear your band on the radio, I see your friend Pete in the news. I know you have money. I’ve never asked you for anything and I don’t want to start now. But we could lose the house. Your stepfather and I are could end up on the street. And that’s if the cancer doesn’t… The least you can do is make a phone call, Andrea. You can give me that.”

Andy feels strangely calm, with their blood roaring through them and their breath knifing jagged in their chest. They’re not gonna call. They can’t. Money they can do. Money—money meant freedom, once. The ability to buy clothes and rent space that held up a mirror to the truth of them. But these days, Andy’s free as they’ve ever been. They cut themself from new cloth. Shirtless in the mirror, their silhouette confirms it. Their shoulders are broad, their chest livid, for now, with scar. Their arms are muscular. The blank canvas of their chest, framed by arms and stomach of ink, can finally get tattooed. They will work their whole body over inch by inch, til their skin ripples and shines with their truth. Til they have made themself anew.

Money they can spare.

Andy hesitates, though. Andy pauses. Because if they can be this generous with their wallet, is there room in them—can they afford to be more generous with their heart?

 

Here’s what it’s like, with Pat and Pete kissing in every corner, their hands leaving burning trails across their skin that Andy can see like glow-in-the-dark, like heat vision. It’s like old times. Every goodbad part of that nostalgia is back, larger than life.

And the music is incredible.

Pat records her vocals for _Disloyal Order_ and Andy’s never heard her sound so good. Pete sketches costumes for this video idea she has, makeup and alter egos and a terrifying merry-go-round, and talks faster than anyone can keep up with, sparking with energy. Jo tears apart every riff that comes her way, makes everything she touches twice as hot and three times as hard as when it came to her. And Andy, finally, just a few hours a day, is _drumming_. It feels—it’s a dead string of Christmas lights come back to life. It’s a puzzle piece fitting, lovers’ anatomy aligning, a spine sliding into place. The thing nobody’s saying is that this is how Fall Out Boy is meant to be. They are less, without this heat. Without the way these two souls meet.

Still. Andy’s getting tired of walking into the room and having them spring apart, clutching hands back to their own bodies as if burned. They aren’t sneaky, and Andy wishes they didn’t act like they were. Their band is starting to stumble and crack under the weight of words unsaid, the growing and bitter list of things they don’t talk about. Jo’s stressed about some pressure the label is putting on her, hurt that Andy didn’t confide in her about their surgery, having a strong reaction to the new-old Pete and Pat dynamic. Pat is thick with guilt about the girlfriend she still hasn’t broken up with and dizzy with her love for Pete, matched in size only by her certainty it’s bad for her. And Pete—Andy can’t even parse the blast of things coming off Pete. All they know is Pete stopped taking lithium when she found out she was pregnant, and now she’s burning too bright to feel conflict or regret. She’s the brightest star in any sky, and Andy can’t see her happiness except through the lens of warning signs.

The band is saved, maybe. Or else it’s doomed. Andy cannot begin to speculate.

*

Moments, hours, days goes by. She touches her lips and thinks of it. She runs her tongue against her own teeth and tastes her future.

It’s a kiss like a cigarette filter: it traps the toxins between them. Holds the poison in. The fiberglass almost but not quite makes it past their lips. Still, there will be marks from this. Smoke swirls on their tongues. Even without damage they can be changed.

It’s a kiss like knowing better. It’s a kiss like sliding into bed together one afternoon, while Jo and Andy go for a hike. It’s a kiss like their bodies bumping, naked and both bigger and softer than the other’s ever felt them. It’s a kiss like Pat beneath her, whispering in her ear, _Are we crazy_ , and Pete dipping mouth-wet fingers between Pat’s legs and saying back, _If we are, it’s folie a deux_.

It’s a kiss like the record starts coming together as soon as Pete and Pat do, and how could that be a bad thing?

It’s a kiss like leaving Never-neverland and growing up, leaving your throne behind in Narnia and going home, except in reverse. It’s a kiss like every time you ever walked away from magic was a mistake playing dress-up as maturity. It’s a kiss like stepping outside of time, a kiss like running away and leaving a trail of knotted bedsheets down the side of the house, a kiss like never dying. A kiss that breaks spells and ends fairy tales. A kiss like no takebacks. A kiss like soulmates. A kiss that tastes like true love.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> your comments give me life, dear ones. thank you, always, for reading <3


	11. if i told you i loved you i don’t know who it would scare away faster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jo Trohman runs out of fucks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday to all my lovelies. I feel like I'm depressing you guys too much for you to keep reading! (I know this hurts--it was meant to.) But I promise that love and joy are all that matter to this particular shark, and I will only hurt you til I stop. There is always, always gonna be love at the end of the road for these girls, because I need to believe there is always gonna be love out in that big shambling universe for us. Let's be kind to each other, babes.
> 
> [i can't believe this playlist is almost 300 songs](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Cool midday light dapples Pete’s pillowcase and the fine, soft skin of her face. If Pat looks closely enough, her skin refracts sunlight like she’s made of diamond. Up close, she’s glitter and rainbow. She’s crystal, fractal but unbroken. She bursts light into every color Pat’s eyes can see and some she can’t. This girl is pure magic.

No wonder Pat can’t tear her eyes away.

No wonder Pat can’t tear her heart apart.

They’re meant to be in the studio this afternoon. They’ve been in each other instead. Their excuses are getting worse, and it’s hard to care. Pat gazes at Pete’s profile, the surprising light and clarity of her dark brown eyes, her sculpted brows, the flat of her nose, the generosity of those lips. Pat sighs. She’s heavy with want, lazy with satiation, all blurred up with love. This is a bad idea. Her whole life is just a patchwork of bad ideas.

“You’re _staring._ Isn’t there something in the Ten Commandments about coveting another man’s wife?” Pete murmurs, pulling the sheet up under her chin and rolling to face Pat.

“So let’s sin a little,” Pat grins. Every single entry on her shortlist of things worth going to hell for can be done here, now, in this bed, with this woman.

“Are you—going to tell Victoria?” Pete winces as she says it, like she wishes she wasn’t asking.

Pat, who has lifted the covers and slid halfway beneath them, pauses, blinking. “Do you really want to have this conversation right now?” she asks. Holding eye contact, she dips her head and starts kissing her way down the massive circumference of Pete’s belly. When Pete’s stomach eclipses her eyes, Pete lets out a fussy sigh. Pat works her way down Pete’s pubic bone while Pete says, “I know I don’t have any right to an opinion here.”

“Like that’s ever stopped you before,” Pat mutters against her inner thigh, her mouth working towards the center of Pete. Pete tastes different than she used to, Pat’s been noticing. She thinks it’s the pregnancy hormones, but her findings thus far as inconclusive. She needs to run so many more trials.

“I just—” Pete’s breath catches as Pat kisses, gentle and open, her swelling labia— “I never really _got_ you two together.”

Pat kisses her soft but steady, wet and open-mouthed, tasting Pete’s readiness for her, breathing her in. It’s such a delicate, powerful position at once. Dark and warm under the sheet, thick with the smell of a glorious afternoon’s fucking, she is happy enough to die. Pete remembers all the things she used to like, is quickly discovering new ones. Even so changed by luxurious growth, Pat still knows Pete’s body by heart. They fit together as perfectly as they ever did. Pat swipes her tongue along the outside of Pete’s pussy and Pete moans like suffering or something sweeter. Pat scans herself for guilt, but all she finds is aching. The way Pete’s pleasure comes out of her mouth in the form of helpless breath makes her weak.

There are 94 different things she could say, about Vicky and Ash and hypocrisy and relationships, but not one of them would taste better on her tongue than the sweet heat of Pete’s interior. She has better ideas about how to use her mouth than arguments or snappy comebacks. Pat opens her mouth and doesn’t say a word.

 

Later, after Pete’s bullied Pat into giving her a wrist massage (“If I get arthritis from finger-fucking you, medically I think you’re the responsible party,” she said; “I’ll ask my lawyer to speak with your lawyer,” said Pat; “I’d prefer to settle this out of court,” said Pete, and now here they are), they are dozing in bed with their phones turned off, lazy and self-satisfied, in a pocket universe that only exists for they two. Pat must drift off, because she wakes to Pete’s chin on the pillow beside her; the other girl is studying her closely.

“Who’s staring now, Ms. Watching You Two From The Closet?” Pat grouses.

Pete asks, “What happens if I fall in love with my own sins?”

Lines like that, they’re stinging splinters in Pat’s heart. Individually, she can cope with them; they are small measures of pain. But they accumulate til she bleeds out drop by drop. They accumulate til she’s gasping. Til whatever’s holding her together gives in to the collapse.

“I didn’t ever stop loving you,” she says, speaking her most dangerous truth before she can think better of it. Pat is so, so tired of policing her heart.

Pete laughs softly, but not like anything’s funny. “You’re the one who left _me_ ,” she points out.

“Let’s not,” Pat says quickly. She can’t quite keep the snap of bitterness out of her voice.

“We never talked about it, though,” says Pete. “I was all the way in love with you, and you just—quit. That was your decision. My words and wishes didn’t matter anymore. You left, took my voice with you. I never got to understand why.”

Pat squeezes her eyes shut til she sees stars. “You understood why.”

They’re on the edge of something, a precipice—and for the first time Pat’s ever seen, Pete Wentz steps back instead of hurling herself into hurt and anger. Maybe she is changing. Maybe they both are.

“Okay,” she says, and she kisses Pat’s forehead. “We don’t have to rehash ancient history. We can do something new.”

She kisses Pat’s nose, her chin, her lips. They melt together like they always do. Did. Do. Without Pete’s belly between them, Pat would forget any time had passed at all. Without the ring on Pete’s finger, Pat would just pick up where they left off _._ Pete’s tongue finds hers, their bodies shift, Pete’s thigh rubs just so between Pat’s legs—and just like Pete said, something new is beginning. There’s no reason to think about the past.

*

Everything is moving way too fast.

The record is incredible, the hardest they’ve ever worked and the best songs they’ve ever written. Every day in the studio, Pete is amazed by what she hears: never in a million years did she think this band would sound so good. They were never supposed to make it half this far.

“You’re right,” she tells Jo, who kind of hates her right now for reasons Pete would prefer not to guess. “Fall Out Boy is going to take over the world. Rock domination. We’re unstoppable.”

Jo doesn’t bite. She just grunts, chin tucked to her chest, and keeps her eyes fixed on her fingers’ path along her guitar strings.

They’re at the length they need for a studio release, though none of them feel the record is quite finished yet. Pete has one more song in particular she needs to write—a song for Pat. A love song in her own way. And maybe an apology. And maybe a goodbye.

Listen: soon the record will be done. They can’t live in Oakwood forever. Her belly keeps getting bigger and she has to urinate approximately 18 times a day at this point. When this baby comes, Pete’s commitments made flesh, she is not going to be able to play at denial any longer. She is not going to be able to have one foot in each world. She can’t put her heart into two different people, not honestly, not forever. Not if one of them is Pat.

She doesn’t know how to tell Pat that they’re running out of time.

 

She gets the girls from summer tour—Vicky noninclusive—and a few other friends of the band to come out and help with the backing vocals for _Donnie_. She wants to keep it secret from Pat, but Andy and Jo overrule her.

“No more secrets,” Andy says sternly, touching their own chest lightly. They’ve been recording shirtless the last few weeks, since they finally told Pat and Jo about the surgery. Their scars look great, and the freedom to finally go without a sweat-soaked shirt and uncomfortable binder—the glow coming off them is magnificent. They can’t stop talking about their plans for their chest tattoo. It is good to see them so expansive and full of life.

“Plus she’ll kill all three of us if we leave her out of a project as dorky as collaborative vocals, and I’m too pretty to die,” adds Jo.

“Wait, would you rather die ugly?” Andy asks.

“I plan to live until I am a hideous shambling ruin.”

“So you’re thinking, what? 30, 35?”

Jo smacks their bare shoulder with a satisfying thwack. “You think I’m sexy and everyone knows it, Hurley.”

“Would you guys stop flirting and help me plan this?” Pete interrupts. This earns her the death glare to end all death glares, which, yeah, she deserves.

“Could fucking talk about who’s wasting our time flirting,” Jo mutters. Andy leans their head against her giant curly triangle of hair in silent, physical comfort.

“Hey,” warns Pete. Whatever’s happening with Pat is one area she is absolutely unwilling to be teased about. She doesn’t even want to talk about it. It’s—well. It’s not like she’s proud of herself. It’s not like her behavior is something she wants to fucking acknowledge, let alone discuss with Jo. Is it even cheating, if it’s with Pat? Don’t answer that.

“Hey yourself,” Jo says aggressively. “Don’t do shit you’re ashamed of if you don’t want to feel shame.”

“ _Off limits,_ ” snaps Pete. “This topic is off limits. That’s a hard boundary, Jo Troh. Don’t test it.”

She doesn’t know why she thought taking a hard line would work with Jo, though. It never, never has. This is why they fight like siblings, why the two of them have more conflict than anyone else in the band. Because Jo is a fucking immovable object, and she doesn’t care at all if  you decide to crack your skull open running into her. And Pete doesn’t know how to solve a problem by moving away from it: she’s stuck in forward motion.

Jo’s hands go to her hips, her mouth twisting dangerously. “You want to talk about limits and boundaries, Wentz? Because last I checked, your romantic exploits have nearly broken this band on not one, not two, but _three_ occasions. You know what’s off limits? You making unilateral decisions that affect all of us. You letting your cunt call the shots and taking idiotic fucking action—”

Pete steps forward and shoves Jo in the chest. She’s a pregnant rage monster. She’s not thinking. The baby does a flip inside her, making her want to vom. Her tits hurt 100% of the time these days, even when Pat’s mouth is on them. The smell of Jo’s hair products make her queasy, her bass is brutally uncomfortable on her belly, and she’s been living in a roach motel with these assholes for going on six weeks. She is not fucking listening to _anyone_ say _shit_ about her and Pat.

“Don’t fucking talk about things you don’t understand,” she snarls. “An, get her off my ass.”

Andy looks affronted that Pete would drag them into this. They press against Jo and wrap an arm across her chest. At first Pete thinks they’re restraining Jo from flying into violence, but then she recalibrates: Andy’s holding Jo in solidarity.

“What, you agree with her? Is that what that cozy little hug means?” Pete’s too angry now to back down. Too angry to do anything but explode. “Do you have _any idea_ what it’s like to be me? Do you? The punching bag for this whole fucking band? The one who’s out in front with gossip hawkers and paparazzi balls-deep in my life all the time? I can’t take a _shit_ without there being pictures of it on the internet, without getting _death and rape threats_ sent to my house, a house my _child_ is going to live in in about two fucking minutes. I have to see the love of my life, my goddamn soulmate, the girl I loved with my whole self til she _decided she didn’t want me_ , every day—have to engage her in the most intimate kind of creative process, show her _my_ guts so _you_ can have careers—how could you possibly understand that? You have no fucking idea how much I do for you!”

“We’d have careers without you, Pete,” Andy says, their voice rocky.

At the same time, a caustic laugh bursts out of Jo. “Oh, and who’s asking you to do all this shit, Peter-fucking-Pan? Who nominated you angstqueen of the century, who decided you get every bit of glory and attention and fame, who decided it’s all about you and Pat like the rest of us are invisible, untalented, totally replaceable? Don’t make your obsession with being the bad guy about us, just put some fucking clothes on, step out from in front of the cameras for one fucking second, and _stop sleeping with your ex-girlfriend and using the band as an excuse_ —”

So much is coming to a head at once. Every ounce of ugliness she’s ever swallowed is coming up, like Pete’s skin is cracking and everything she pretends to be is peeling away, and all that’s left is the small, humiliated girl who’s never managed to make the rest of the world hate her half as much as she hates herself.

Crying, now, blind with rage and half-suffocated by snot, words and worse pour out of her. “Am I cutting you out of the spotlight or am I using you as an excuse, Josephine? Make up your fucking mind. Which of us is really obsessed with me being the bad guy, I wonder? You think I don’t know I’m fucking up? Do you really think that? Let me assure you: _I know I’m fucking up_. _I always know I’m fucking up_. I know I should walk away, but I just want to let her break my brain. I can’t quit, okay? The eyes of the whole fucking media industry are on me, I’ve got a husband, I’m here with my best friends, and _I am alone._ If I could make you as lonely as me, you’d get addicted too. She’s the one thing that’s ever felt right in my life, and it’s all so _fucked_ , I fucked it all up, shitty Pete Wentz ruins everything _again_. You think I don’t know? You think I don’t know the whole band, fuck, the whole _world_ would be better off without me?”

And yeah, in this moment? Pete _does_ expect her friends to move towards her. She breaks open like a thunderhead, just fucking weeping, and she expects them to move in. To comfort her. To show her the love and unconditional acceptance they always have, the love and unconditional acceptance she works her hardest to show them. It’s what they’ve earned, through all their years of fights and friendship, of falling apart and putting themselves back together. It’s the faith that is their bond.

But they don’t. Jo and Andy are a closed unit. They form a circuit without her, warm against each other while she cries in the cold. No one touches her arm or pulls her into a hug. No one tells her she’s gonna be okay. They just watch her crumple herself up with ugly tears, fat and alone, and neither of them calls her bluff.   

Jo says, “Maybe we would be.”

Then Pete really falls apart.

 

Whose arms does she tumble into but Pat’s? Whose mouth does she kiss desperate, whose back does she press to the wall, whose tights does she tug down, whose warmth does she bury her fingers in, whose breath in her ear is the only thing that could possibly distract her from herself? From the screaming, wheeling black hole of her small and dirty self.

Pete hates herself for the way she uses people like medicine. The way she acts like Pat is just another hit she can take off memory, like the jolt of dopamine she finds between Pat’s thighs is the same as being well, like every other person that exists is just here to give her whatever it is she’s decided she deserves to feel this week.

Pat deserves better. Ash deserves better. One day maybe she’ll even believe that _she_ deserves better.

She fucks Pat til they’re both raw, til she yells with pleasure because no one listens if she yells with pain, til she realizes she didn’t write Pat a love song, she wrote a goodbye.

Pete is finally going to learn to say goodbye.

What a fucking catch.

*

Jo is sullen and challenging before the interview even begins. She _never_ gets tapped to do solo interviews. Even the gear she sponsors, she contacts them the majority of the time, saying: _look, I’m in a pretty big band, we’re in the entertainment media all the time, I’m using and talking about your equipment, I could really use a new touring amp, what have you got._ And when you do a group interview with Pete and Pat—it’s laughable. Pretty much since the last time they did their own interviews as gags, weird bored kids on a tour bus, Jo hasn’t had a camera pointed at her except when she’s gonna get cropped out of  the edge of a close-up on Pete.

So this very nice staff writer from NME takes her to Doomie’s, and Jo shovels deep-fried vegan goodness into her face scowling. She’s not even vegan. This food in incredible, but that’s not the point. It’s like all the media industry knows about her is that she’s a non-Pete, ancillary member of the band, and is therefore interchangeable with the others. Could she be the vegan one? Sure, probably! She’s a fucking back-up singer. She’s been a back-up singing photo crop-out for the last 8 years, and she’s in a mood about it.

“So, if recording’s wrapping up, what’s the next stage?” Rachel the Reporter asks, sucking down vegan Oreo milkshake. “Are you going home to your boyfriend while your producers get to work?”

This poor woman is probably just trying to build rapport, ask some soft questions to get Jo’s guard down, but it was the wrong fucking tactic to take with this particular out-of-fucks Jewish girl. Never one to hold back from speaking her mind, Jo points a french fry at Rachel and says, “That’s a sexist question.”

“Excuse me?” Rachel is visibly taken aback.

“If I was a dude, would you assume I wasn’t involved with the post-production process? Would you assume I was just gonna run into some man’s arms while someone else took over my music? Or would you ask, _what’s the next stage after recording_ and then listen with interest while I described the technical intricacies of mixing and finishing our tracks?” Jo dredges her fry through ketchup and pops it into her mouth with grim satisfaction.

The reporter opens and closes her mouth a few times before she starts getting words out. “Wow, um, it’s the first time someone’s asked me that? But yeah, I think I usually ask male artists about their families too. It’s typically considered polite?”

Jo snorts. She’s being an ass and she doesn’t care. “No one ever asks us about the music. They want to ask about personal life, fashion, if our boyfriends mind us being on the road all the time. They want to see if they can get us to talk shit about each other or Pete. You see us as Barbie dolls, not artists.”

Rachel keeps glancing at her digital recorder, which is blinking on the table between them, like she’s trying to remind Jo that she’s speaking on the record. Jo shrugs, stuffs more food in her mouth. Whatever. Like anything she says ever gets printed anyway.

“So there are a lot of external tensions, being the foremost female-fronted band in rock right now,” Rachel says.

“That’s another thing everybody wants to talk about,” Jo says. “That we’re women. Not in any kind of interesting way that has anything to say about gender; not in a way that centers nonbinary or gender-expansive people like Andy. Just the same old ‘a girl with a guitar is like a dog riding a bicycle, remember when we all saw Pete’s pussy on the internet, how do you maintain a trim waistline while touring, feminism isn’t sexy’ garbage.”

Rachel kind of frowns at her, biting into her burrito. “Okay, so, what do _you_ want to talk about?”

And Jo’s been so frustrated for so long, and no one ever asks her this, no one ever wants to hear what she has to say at all. So she just opens her mouth and starts talking. She doesn’t think too much about what she says.

“You don’t notice it, with me in Pete and Pat’s shadows all the time? But I never wanted to be the girl songs were written about. I always wanted to be the girl writing them…”

 

Their last week of recording and Andy pulls this shit. The very last week of what Jo’s pretty convinced is the very last record she makes with Fall Out Boy, and all she’s trying to do is get through it and not think too much, and Andy fucking— Ugh! Jo cannot afford to fall apart right now. This doesn’t feel like a safe space to be vulnerable anymore. She can’t deal with all of this. She’s just one girl!

Okay, okay. Here’s what happens:

“Honey, I’m home!” Jo cries, throwing open the door to their suite. She and Andy have kinda been de facto roommates since Pete and Pat started up again: the walls at Oakwood are thin, but a full wall muffles more sound than half of one, so here they are. Jo’s been ranting a lot—her feelings about Pete, her feelings about Pete’s behavior, her feelings about Pete and Pat being obsessed with each other and pushing her out of the band—and Andy is an excellent listener. They say things like, “We will burn the world down with your rage when we run out out of ways to keep warm.” For some reason, Jo finds that very comforting. The last few nights, they’ve fallen asleep in the same bed, zonking out during crappy action movies. It reminds Jo of when they all lived together in the same apartment, but not in a way that makes her sad. Today she went out and picked up vegan food as a ‘you’re the only thing keeping me sane’ present so they can eat together, just the two of them.

The domesticity of rooming with Andy feels safe and good in a way that living with Mark, all the different times she’s tried it, never has. But Jo guesses that’s what makes friendship different from romance: it’s love without possession, without entitlement. Jo knows Andy will always support her in the pursuit of what’s best for her, no matter what. Romantic love is self-interested, friendship is unconditional, asks for nothing back.

Or maybe that’s just the difference between loving anyone else on the planet and loving Andy.

So they’re eating vegan pizza with jalapeños and mock duck, and Jo’s hands are greasy and Andy has sauce on their chin, and Jo just blurts it out: “Being with you feels really good.”

Andy directs their shy smile into their pizza, but that doesn’t stop Jo from seeing it. “It feels good to me too,” they say. Jo is delighted by their shyness, by making them blush. Andy is usually bulletproof in one-on-one situations, loud and goofy and unembarrassable. Jo likes seeing them flustered.

“Your ears are turning pink,” she points out, hoping to make it worse. “Wow, my affection really must mean a lot to you.”

“Shut up and eat your pizza,” Andy mumbles. Their smile doesn’t dim, and their blush doesn’t either.

“I kind of want to talk about something,” Jo says. She’s butterflies all the way through with what she’s planning to say. She wouldn’t believe her own audacity, except she’s Jo Trohman, so of course she can. “Um, I don’t want to make you feel weird, or make anything awkward between us. It’s… it’s a very new thing for me, and I’m not sure where it’s going, but, um...”

Andy has gone very still. They’re looking at her and not the pizza now. “I’ve been wondering if we were gonna talk about it,” they say. “Ever since Pete said that thing about flirting.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” says Jo. “Yes. That is exactly what I want to talk about.”

Andy bites their lip. “I just, um, before we have this conversation, I have something I need to say to you.”

“Of course.” Jo nods gently, trying to be encouraging. Her heart is racing more than she understands.

“Okay. Um, I’m just gonna say it. I admire you more than anyone I know. Seriously, ever since I met you, I’ve been—kind of in awe. I look at you and I know, I _know_ all the way down, this is a girl worth the whole world. This is a girl who knows it, who’s gonna get it for herself, who’s not gonna let anyone stand in her way. This girl is gonna grab the whole world and not be satisfied til she gets the moon too. You’re inspirational. Like, kind of my role model. You shine so bright to me, Jo. I never want you to doubt that.”

Jo’s eyes are wet. “Wow,” she manages. Her throat is scratchy and hot. Receiving that much kindness at once is a little overwhelming, even for Jo. “You shine for me, too.”

“So the thing I feel between us—I mean, it scares me. I don’t want to be Pete and Pat, I don’t want to—I don’t want to risk what we have. That’s why I haven’t ever made a move. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to, it’s—”

“Wait.” Jo’s totally lost. Her face is hot now too, not just her throat. “What do you mean, made a move?”

Andy’s eyes go wide. They open their mouth and close it again. “I mean—like—c’mon, you know what I mean. I like you, Jo. I’ve liked you for years. We flirt all the time. At the wedding, we—”

“What? Stop.” The words burst out of Jo automatically. She’s standing, doesn’t remember when she got off the bed, but she’s standing up and she’s stepping back and she’s holding her hands out between them like a shield. “I’m not—ew, no, you’re my best friend, I’m not _hitting on you_ , that would be gross.”

Andy makes a face but Jo’s fear spurs her on. She just keeps babbling. Maybe she thinks more words will make it better, she doesn’t know. Maybe she’s not thinking anything. Her mouth is moving and it won’t stop. “I’m not confessing my love for you, slow the fuck down. I’m—I’m starting a new band. I was gonna ask you to join it. I don’t know if Fall Out Boy is in my future, and, um, you’re the best drummer I know, so I wanted to ask you to come with me.”

There’s no sign of their blush anymore. Andy’s face is fully ashen. “Because I’m a good drummer,” they echo.

“Well, I mean, and my favorite person that I’ve ever met, but that’s not—what is even _happening_ right now? Are you—Andy, don’t be embarrassed, I—”

“Embarrassed?” Andy’s shaking their head, their face strangely still. “No, I’m not embarrassed. I—you know, I imagined this conversation a lot of times, every possible outcome, and never once did I think you’d recoil in disgust and call me _gross_.” They throw their half-eaten slice back into the pizza box, greasy and unappealing on the generic bedspread.

“No, I didn’t mean _you’re_ gross, I meant that hitting on you would make _me_ gross—”

“This is the most cissexist fucking thing I’ve ever—”

“Whoa! No! I would feel predatory and lecherous if I—we’ve been friends for so long, I don’t—” But then Jo’s crying too hard to get words out of her mouth, and Andy is cold and cruel with fury, and Jo is so brokenhearted that Andy could think that of them, that Andy could be so ungenerous in their assumptions about Jo that they would jump right to _she thinks I am disgusting because I am nonbinary_ , that she’s hyperventilating, she’s might puke, there’s a solid probability she’s gonna pass out.

“If anyone should be embarrassed it’s _you_ ,” Andy says. It is, Jo thinks, the cruelest thing they have ever heard come out of Andy Hurley’s mouth. She’s crying and she’s stunned, she’s just fucking stunned, and even while it’s happening Jo regrets that she doesn’t stop Andy from leaving.

Grown-ups can’t just storm out, grown-ups have to deal with their problems. But Jo’s not grown up. Jo’s been on the road since high school. Jo grew up onstage and on the pages of magazines. She’s 23 years old, she’s losing her friends and she’s losing her band, and for the first time she’s realizing that as cocky and selfsure as she’s always been, without those things she’s completely fucking lost.

*

This time when Andy’s phone rings, they answer it. There is so much they’re tired of not saying.

 


	12. i could be so happy if i just quit being sad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is every kind of leaving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> get ready for the first happy chapter of this whole story....... which i'll be posting next week
> 
> love you guys.
> 
> [JAMS](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Eventually, everything ends.

All the things you carried out of your heart and set up in another person, to make a home there—you have to carry it all back out again when they leave you. Your arms are sore, your back strained to breaking with the weight of it all, the brutal haul to collect the refracted fragments of your heart. But what are your options? They leave you, and those things are lost, unless you extricate your love and your faith and the best parts of yourself that you were using to illuminate them.

Pete never carried herself back out.

Here are the stages of leaving. Here are the stages of being left:

First, she and Pat pack up together. It could be somber, digging beneath the mattress for _is this your sock?_ and _have you seen my toothbrush?_ and _umm, you’re not gonna believe where I found your underwear_ and _actually I remember that night pretty clearly_ , but it feels more like the end of summer camp than a heartwrenching goodbye. Pat’s cheeks are flushed from laughing, and she floats around Pete sweetly. They get distracted kissing more than once. No one is talking about what happens after this, and Pete thinks they’ve finally agreed how this works. Together these last few weeks they slipped into magic, lost themselves. Waking up on the wrong side of reality is something they can mourn later: why waste the last of their moments railing against the passage of time?

Pete thinks, neither of them believes in the fiction of separation any longer. Pete thinks, no one is protesting inevitability because the two of them, Pete & Pat, _they_ are the inevitable. _They_ are the force of nature it would be futile to resist.

Pete thinks, they will find a way to be together this time. Pete thinks, that’s fucking crazy. The fish rolls over inside her and Pete clamps a hand to her belly and can’t tell anymore when she’s lying to herself, when she’s telling the truth.

Second, Pete and Pat and Andy and Jo clasp each other, in the front room of one of their crappy suites. There is so much rolled into this one hug, so many things that should have been said that weren’t and things that shouldn’t have been said that were, so many _last time_ s and _never again_ s—so many girls and arms and hearts, so many human people blurring their edges together this one last time. Living together like they’re kids again, this is the pulse of Pete’s life. This is the very best part. Just four tired kids in a broken-down van. It’s a hug she’d stay in forever, even with so much struggling inside of it.

But everything ends.

Third, the airport. Pete doesn’t give a damn who sees when she clutches Pat against her, pressing the other woman as close as they can get around the massiveness of her. She cries onto Pat’s soft shoulder, the place where she’s laid her head so many nights. The smell of Pat’s neck haunts her when she lifts her face again. They’re right in front of everyone, the whole staring world, but Pete kisses Pat, swift as it is indiscreet, square on the mouth. Pete squeezes her hand and murmurs, “Don’t say goodbye to me. Don’t. Just—come home with me instead.”

Pat, her eyes sparkling sharp with tears she won’t release, lets out a strangled bark of a laugh. “Home?” she whispers. They are speaking fast in the quiet fury of parting, their heads tipped close. “You’re the one who left home. Fly to Chicago with me, if you don’t want to say goodbye.”

Their hands held so tight between them Pete’s knuckles are white. Her last sight of Pat’s dear face vanished by the fog-mirror fade of her weeping eyes. “I love you,” Pete whispers, but it gets tangled up in a sob, and she can’t tell if Pat hears her. All she knows is Pat kisses her again and breaks the link. She pulls her hands free.

“God, but I like you best when you like me back,” Pat says, urgent and low in her throat. Then she grabs her luggage cart and hurries to catch up with Jo. Pete wipes her eyes clear, again and again and again, her hoodie sleeves going black with spilt eyeliner, but not once does she see Pat look back.

Not being told goodbye is, after all, worse.

Fourth, Pat breaks things off with Vicky. She calls Pete to tell her about it. She tries to be very brave, but Pete can tell she feels terrible. By the end of the call they’re both crying.

Fifth, after that they slip into a routine of calling every night. They talk about everything, except the fact that they’re talking. Pete updates Pat on the wild and voracious sex dreams her pregnancy is plaguing her with; Pat mixes and remixes version of their recorded songs, making silly versions just for Pete; Pete writes a lullaby for her little fish with Pat’s help; they both say _I miss you._ It doesn’t matter who calls first.

Sixth, Pete and Ash don’t want to know the sex of their baby. They’ve agreed this from the start. Or: Ash has agreed with Pete, like he always does. Pete wants the cub to be safe a little longer, undetermined, swimming sweetly. Once girlhood is spoken out loud, it is consumed, and Pete never learned how to protect anyone from that, least of all herself. And if the fish is a boy, well. Pete will love him. Of course she will.

They don’t want to know the sex of their baby, and so they don’t, until one morning Pete wakes up to a thousand million calls and emails, because her sonogram and the words _FALL OUT GIRL: PETE WENTZ’S PREGNANCY REVEALED_ has just been printed on the cover of Us Weekly.

Pete doesn’t know anymore if anything good can survive her proximity. Not Pat, not Ash, not the band, not even this baby. Inside the magazine, she sees pictures of herself that are totally new to her, an experience that never loses its surreal edge. There’s shots of her splashing Pat in the pool at Oakwood (planetary, striped with lard-yellow stretchmarks, chubby cottage cheese thighs) and she can’t believe she ever thought she looked cute in that suit. There’s her and Ash, thin-lipped and silent, leaving her OB/GYN’s office with the sun in their eyes, looking like they hate each other. (Pete remembers that day. They were annoyed at all the paps. They were tired. Ash was holding her hand, tracing soothing circles into her palm. She burst into tears when they got in the car and he took her for ice cream. None of that shows up in print.) There’s Pete with a Starbucks cup and the caption, _Tell Pete Wentz to Google ‘effect of caffeine on developing fetus.’_ She was drinking herbal tea. There’s a picture of a dark-haired woman in a hospital bed that isn’t even her. There’s a picture of her totally fucked up at one of their first shows after she moved out to LA, glazed over with alcohol and who knows what else with a bleeding lip, nearly two years ago but not dated.

And then there’s this old picture of her, barely legal, onstage at an Arma show. She’d jumped in the crowd and they’d stripped her like Courtney Love, and Pete had finished the set screaming into the mic half-covering her tits with her hands, the slamming final chorus of _Grab me, make me, try and take me / I’ll cut you in half / I’ll kick your head in / We are not things_ made stronger by the image of her bare breasts, flushed with the handprints of strangers.

The heading across the whole article is _WHAT LITTLE GIRLS ARE MADE OF_.

Pete calls her OB/GYN. She could scream and rant, accuse the doc of leaking to the press, but it doesn’t matter, does it? She’s pregnant enough to pop, finding a good doctor in Los Angeles is impossible, and she doesn’t know where the leak came from anyway. All she wants to know is, is it true? Is she having a girl?

Seventh, the doctor says, _You’re bringing a girl into a world that eats girls alive. The whore of Babylon pulls from her hoary cunt another sacrifice to this world of men. Imagine being a little girl and having Pete Wentz as a mother._

Or maybe the doctor doesn’t say that. Maybe she just says _yes_ , and the rest is in Pete’s own voice, in Pete’s own head. It doesn’t matter. A girl, a girl. The happiest news she’s ever received. A girl, and she read it first in a magazine. A girl, one more precious thing to be corrupted by her life.

Pete curls around herself like a salted slug and cries.

*

Andy’s been in too many damn hospitals lately.

Last week it was their mom. This week it’s Pete.

“Swore you’d never make me visit you in a hospital again,” Andy greets her, kissing Pete’s forehead, squeezing Pete’s hand.

Pete, her face knotted up with pain, pale and flushed at once, barks out a laugh. “You want to talk about who’s being _made to_ right now? I am _seven centimeters dilated_ , Andy. _Seven centimeters._ If you have complaints—” and she gasps, clenching Andy’s hand all the more tightly— “you may address them to my daughter.”

“One Wentz girl after another terrorizing my life,” Andy says, and they are so filled with love for this sweating, pregnant disaster, they could overflow.

Last week, at their mom’s bedside—

But they don’t get far down that rabbit hole, because Jo walks in, holding flowers and balloons and saying, “I couldn’t decide, I wanted to get the whole fucking store sent up to you,” and there’s this moment where she sees Andy and she _freezes_ , it’s like a DVD that’s skipped, but then she finishes her sentence and runs up to Pete squealing like it never happened. Maybe it didn’t, except that Andy saw it.

There’s this thing they used to do, Andy and Jo, when Pete was in the hospital last time. When they got overwhelmed, or Pete was sleeping, or the doctors (or Mrs. Wentz) shooed them out of the room, they’d rove the halls trying to get into supply closets. It was dark in there, and quiet: it felt safe, a small private world where they didn’t have to listen to heart monitors or worry that their friend might die, die on purpose, die now, die later. They’d sit in the dark, their knees touching, and sometimes they’d cry, or talk about what it felt like to get that phone call, or wonder if Pat was ever going to stop looking so wracked and haunted, or just be quiet there together, or sing so loudly they got rousted out by an annoyed medical resident. Then they’d steal extra pillows and blankets and pretend to be punk rock nurses’ aids, offering them out to patients who seemed lonely or cold. They were always laughing and brave again by the time they showed their faces back at Pete’s bedside.

Anyway, when Pete’s OB/GYN clears the room for an exam, Andy looks at Mrs. Wentz, Andy looks at Ash’s glowing, nervous face, and Andy looks at Jo. Their eyes lock and whatever weirdness is between them, they don’t have to speak to know what to do. They excuse themselves, start looking for closets.

Andy has no idea how to talk to Jo in the fluorescent hallways. They haven’t, since recording ended. Jo flew back to Chicago and Andy flew back to Milwaukee, and the phone lines have been dead between them. Once they’re tucked away together in the antiseptic-smelling dark, it gets easier.

“Wow, these closets were bigger when we were kids,” Andy says. These are the first words they say to their best friend in nearly two months.

Jo snorts. “You sure fit in them easier then, anyway.”

“Is that a coming out joke? Oh my god.”

“Maybe supply closets are bigger in the Midwest. Maybe this economical use of space is, like, a Los Angeles thing. That’s why so many people are out here—closets are too small to stay in.”

Their shoulders jostle and bump, and Andy really, really hopes Jo doesn’t think they’re trying to be creepy or inappropriate. There just isn’t a lot of room in here. They feel tangled up about what happened, what they said, and here in the dark they feel afraid Jo might mention it. To avoid this, they blurt out the first thing they can think of, which is, “So I saw my mom last week.”

Andy can’t quite see her in the dark, but they’re pretty sure Jo’s mouth falls open in shock. “Are you okay?” is the first thing she says, and no matter what hurt and awkwardness lies between them, Andy can’t help but love her.

“Um, I’m trying not to just say _yeah_ and shut down your concern,” Andy says slowly. “But I feel a little overwhelmed by receiving your concern right now. I’m not _not_ okay, I guess.”

Jo slides down the wall with a leather-jacket-slither, til she’s sitting by Andy’s feet. She reaches up, gropes blindly til she grabs Andy’s hand, and tugs downward. Andy slides to the ground, and to fit in this small space, their legs press against their chest and against Jo. Jo does not let go of their hand, which makes Andy feel staticky inside, so they pull it free and bury it between their legs and the rest of their body.

Because she knows Andy very well, Jo doesn’t say anything. She just leaves silence and space for Andy to expand into.

Andy’s exhale is enormous, shaky. They wonder if Jo can hears their ribs judder while breath leaves their lungs. “I visited her in the hospital.”

The story spools out of them, then. How they’d been speaking on the phone, and that was painful, but going okay. How their mom was casually damaging, but so obviously _trying_ not to say the wrong thing. It was the first time she’d ever seemed to try. Andy felt like, _this woman who brought me into the world is scared because she is leaving it, and she wants a chance to know me as I really am, to see if she can love me this way. She wants a chance to love me._ Then she went in for a terrifying procedure, the kind that people don’t always live through, and she asked if Andy would come. Andy had been giving her money for a couple months by then, so what harm would it do, to give her a chance too? Andy could afford it. Andy was a big enough to offer that. Weren’t they? Andy was strong enough by now not to give away anything they couldn’t spare, under the misbelief that this was kindness. Weren’t they?

And so to the hospital they went. The first time they saw their mother in years, this flesh they crawled from, and she was so small and defenseless, which is easy to mistake for innocence. The phone conversations, they hadn’t been _good_ , but they had been _endurable_. Andy felt exhausted after, too hollow and used-up to do anything more than watch TV from a horizontal position, but there was an abstract moral rightness, wasn’t there? Some higher imperative of healing empowered by building a bridge back to the people who have hurt you?

Here’s the problem with healing for the sake of healing: you can’t heal if you aren’t ready to be changed. You can’t _love_ if you aren’t ready to be changed. Love and forgiveness, these are dynamic forces that act on the people involved, changing them indelibly. So even if Andy’s heart, swaddled in unshown scar, was open to that, their mom’s would need to be too.

Andy did not find a heart willing to be changed in that hospital. Andy found a sick, scared woman whose lifelong negativity had turned back on herself as a cancer, poison that can only be treated by poisoning. Andy found a woman who didn’t understand their life and didn’t wish to try. Andy found a deadname, a hateful and insistent pronoun, the word _daughter_ spoken casual but hitting like a bullet. Rather than any big, identifiable, objective assault, Andy found what they always had: an insidious, unnameable pain. One that their mother and Darryl had always called _overreacting, exaggerating, being too sensitive_. One that only in adulthood had Andy begun to consider might be better named _abuse_.

“The reason she can’t change is because she’s already doing the best she can,” Andy says here, now, in the closet of another hospital, their voice breaking ragged on the words. It has cost them dearly to understand this. “It’s—it’s not her fault she can’t give me the things I need.” Jo makes a sound, one of many slightly strangled aggressive noises that have come out of her in the course of this story. “It’s not,” Andy repeats firmly. “But I don’t have to put myself in the path of damage to protect her from her own behavior, either. Parents are—parents are the ones who are supposed to do that. If I visit again, it has to be… because I’m overflowing, because I have _enough_ that I can give some of the extra to her, does that make sense? I can’t be generous to someone who hurts me when I’m coming from a state of need. I can’t give her anything I want back, because I won’t get it.”

“You sound so grown-up,” Jo says once the silence settles. “Like you figured yourself out.”

“Well, I _am_ quite venerable at 28. Meanwhile you can’t even rent a car,” Andy says, grateful for the opportunity to be light after spooling out so much heaviness.

“Can too! I just have to put down an extra deposit.” There’s a pause, then: “I’m sticking my tongue out at you. You can’t see it, but I am.”

Andy laughs softly. “Anyway, uh. I haven’t really talked about it. Pete’s, you know, giving birth, and… I guess I just wanted it to be you I told, and if I couldn’t tell you, it was easier not to tell anyone. I really miss you, Jo.”

Jo is quiet for long enough that Andy starts to feel rejected before she says, “I know. I miss you too. And you were right.”

“About my mom?”

“Yes, I mean, yes. So much yes. You’re fucking courageous and kinder than she deserves. But I meant—you’re right about the, the vibe, the dynamic, the whatever between you and me. We’ve been flirting since we were kids. Um, do you remember that time we kissed?”

Andy doesn’t want to have this conversation. Andy never wants to talk out loud about this part of their relationship with Jo ever again. But they know that shame has to be spoken out loud to be stripped of its power. They know that some wounds have to be named before they can heal.

They close their eyes, even against the dark, and say, “I don’t need anything from you, Jo. I don’t expect anything. I misread a moment, and I told you something true about what you mean to me, and fuck, I don’t want to regret that. The record drops next week and... I just want to be able to talk to my best friend.”

“I don’t know if I just want that,” Jo says. Andy wishes they could see her face. “I wasn’t—if my shitty kneejerk reaction was transphobic, I want you to know I don’t feel that way, and I’m so sorry I caused you pain.”

“No, I know,” Andy says. Relief is starting to spread in their chest, the bundled knot of all this misery unfurling slow. “I know you weren’t being transphobic. I… your reaction hurt me, and I overreacted. But I know you better than to assume something that ugly about you. You’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.”

“Well, and I guess I need it,” Jo says. She laughs weakly. “I’m still sorry. I want you to be safe with me, always. I don’t want to cause those feelings even for a moment.”

Andy has accepted they will cry in the delivery room when they meet their niece for the first time, but they are not prepared to cry in this supply closet. Their voice is thick when they say, “You’re safe. You’ve always been safe.”

“A minute ago. I said, um, or started to say. I just think. Maybe if we kissed again sometime, as adults? And found out what it feels like now? I would be interested in the results of that experiment, and not just for science. If you’d be into that.”

This, then, is altogether something new. Andy bumps Jo with their knees, jostling her. “I will take it under advisement,” they say, because they don’t know yet either what they want, except that they want to think about it properly before they answer. “For now, let’s get back to this baby situation?”

“I don’t want to miss the part where the xenomorph bursts out of her chest,” Jo says. Andy gets to their feet, tries to help Jo up, and just bumps into her and gropes her shoulders a bunch. They spill out of the closet into the light laughing, Jo doing her best Alien impression. Andy feels the lightness of possibility settle over their shoulders like a cloak, like a sun, like a shield. They are ready to welcome new life into the world.

*

Bronx Mowgli Wentz is the tiniest, most beautiful creature Jo has ever seen.

She comes into the world red and wrinkled and quick to scream. She has cheekbones like her mother and a fuzz of blond hair like her father. She is small like a stone and smooth like a seal. Jo loves her immediately, easy as breathing, whole as her heart. Something eases in her feelings about Pete when she holds this six slight pounds of girlchild in her arms, feels that tiny heartbeat against her own chest. Bronx turns her face against Jo, away from the light, and Jo’s bitterness towards Pete _releases_ , leaving her like an exhalation. Jo doesn’t want to do things anymore that make her feel bitterness towards her friends. Jo wants to always feel as clear and purehearted as she does in this moment, with this newborn infant in her arms.

That’s why, hours later, when Pete is glowing and the baby is against her chest sleeping and it’s just them, Jo, and Andy in the room, Jo says the last thing she expected to bring up at the birth of a child. She says, “I think we should talk about the future of the band. Things are different now, and… I think that’s good.”

Pete, wearily lit up from the inside like a lantern by love, strokes her daughter’s downy head. Slowly, her eyes locked in tenderness and awe on the life she has created, she says, “I don’t know if I can be in Fall Out Boy anymore.”

“I don’t know if there _is_ a Fall Out Boy anymore,” Jo agrees. She is surprised at her own serenity. She’s been so afraid of this for so long, terrified of losing the band she built with all of herself.

“We have the tour, of course,” Pete says, looking up at them at last. “For _Folie_. I want to do the tour. But… I don’t want to raise this girl in ignominy. I don’t want to figure things out with Pat on the homepage of fucking _Oh No They Didn’t_. Basically, I don’t want to be Pete Wentz anymore. I’m so exhausted of her.”

Jo is nodding. Across the room, Andy watches her closely. Jo feels something squirm hopeful in her chest every time they look at her. She doesn’t know who she is, after Fall Out Boy. She doesn’t know who she can become.

It’s as scary as it ever was. But for the first time, she wants to find out.

 


	13. the heart forms long before the ribcage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which endings are printed in ink and beginnings are born in starlight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love you, I love you, I love you. Your comments carry me through. Thank you everyone for being here.
> 
> [songs to cry about](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

Pat doesn’t fly out for the birth. Maybe one day she will learn to live with that. She’s trying to keep her distance from Pete, maybe. Or she thinks Pete doesn’t want her there. Or she thinks Pete _does_ want her there and that’s worse. Or she doesn’t want to be in the room with Pete and her public, out-loud-on-paper, _legal spouse_ and the future they made together out of their commingled genetic code. Or she does want to be there, but in a fundamentally different way than she’s been invited to be.

Pat wants to be with Pete, or she doesn’t want anything at all.

 

“I wish you were here.” Pete sounds tired and far away. Two weeks old, Bronx isn’t sleeping, which means Pete isn’t sleeping, which means Pat isn’t sleeping, because Pete keeps calling her and making her sing lullabies while she feeds and rocks her troubled infant back to sleep.

It’s so fucking tender it breaks Pat’s heart every time. She wants to _be there_ , kissing Bronx, kissing Pete, singing lullabies. She wants the life she and Pete used to dream of together, the life Pete is sharing with someone else.

Except, Pete’s not just sharing it with someone else. Pete’s on the other end of the phone whenever it rings. Pete’s sharing it with Pat too.

It’s too early or too late, Pat’s too young or too old, to know what the fuck to do with any of this.

“Why haven’t you come yet?” Pete asks. Pat can practically hear her falling asleep mid-sentence. “She’s the only perfect part of me. I want to see your face when you hold her for the first time.”

“No, you don’t,” Pat says, but she says it away from the phone. Her words get lost in a midnight murmur. “Get some sleep, and send me a thousand more pictures of her in the morning.”

“Miss you, Spitfire,” Pete mumbles, halfway back to dreaming. Pat wonders which side of the dream she’s on.

“Love you, Pan,” she says. She doesn’t know anymore if she hopes Pete hears, if she hopes Pete remembers.

 

Pat and Jo are spread out across a coffee shop table, laptops with spreadsheets open in front of them, chasing down venues. Jo fired Bob and keeps vetoing the replacements Crush Management suggests, so they’re booking their own tour dates, and Pat honestly missed this doing this kind of thing. She’s surprised they ever gave it up—but there’s a lot that got lost in that first sweep of fame. There’s a lot they gave up, a lot of what was best about Fall Out Boy that got blinded by flashbulbs and buried in the screams of fangirls and the snarls of men.

“I’m glad we’re doing this together, Jo,” Pat says, because she’s felt far from Jo and lately she just wants to feel closer to everyone.

Jo, still scowling from her last frustrating call, glares at Pat for a second before her face catches up. “Oh! Yeah, me too.”

It’s nice between them, comfy. Recording was so awkward, the stuff with Vicky, the animosity between Jo and Pete, the way Jo started avoiding Pat and hanging out only with Andy—Pat leans in to the restoration offered by this moment.

Until the next venue she calls says, “You want to book for Fall Out Boy? I just read online they’re breaking up. You might want to check in with your client.”

Pat breathes in long and slow between her teeth. The list of shit she’s gotten as a woman musician in her life—editorial comments about her weight; internet rape threats on every video; the things men used to shout before they banned men from the front of their shows; the way they always used to have to open for dudes with worse songs and better instruments and roadies and record deals while they didn’t even have a single crew member, just jeers of the little boys watching them schlep their own stuff; every fucking nobody at every level of event management assuming she’s not with the band; every random asshole she ever meets acting like music isn’t a _serious career_ when a girl does it til they realize she’s been on the fucking cover of Rolling Stone… Pat’s the most serious fucking musician she knows, aside from Andy and Jo, and she is at her limit with this bullshit.

She exhales even slower. It doesn’t matter where her limit is, though. She doesn’t have the luxury of just going off on whoever challenges her temper: a woman showing anger forfeits her legitimacy forever. Once they can tell you your _emotions_ are the problem, all conversations about their _behavior_ ends. So Pat learned how to breathe through her temper years ago. To do otherwise gives away a piece of her power for free, and she is not in a position to give anything away for free.

“I am the client, actually,” she says, very calmly, very professionally. “I am the band. So when I say we want to book a show in Denver this January, I mean it.”

The dude on the other end of the line chuckles indulgently, which makes Pat feel like she’s been lit on fire. Her skin itches and snarls; her hand clenches involuntarily around her phone. He says, “Maybe you should check NME before you make any more calls, sweetie.”

Pat’s voice is a work of art. It could be hung in a museum, in a special installation titled _Male Condescension_ , displayed between a Jackson Pollock splatter triptych of menstrual blood and an infinity mirror of withering stares. Cheerful and without pause, she says, “Okay, great, I’ll do that. And can I please have your manager’s phone number for when I call back?”

She gets off the phone with Exhausting Scumbag #478 and opens a web browser on her laptop. “Weird thing on that call, Jo,” she says. “This dude said he read in NME that our band is breaking up?”

“Dudes say the most fucked up things,” Jo says, rolling her eyes. She comes over to lean over Pat’s chair so they can view the google results together. Pat types _Fall Out Boy breakup rumor_ , for which google has an autocomplete ready to go, and the first result isn’t some weird post on their forum or a ranty livejournal or a Perez Hilton drag, which is what she’s come to expect from the internet. Instead, the first result is an actual legitimate NME link.

“Jo Trohman Talks Frustration, Fractures, and Fall Out Boy’s Future,” Pat reads. Her lips are suddenly dentist-numb. She looks over her shoulder at her friend. Jo’s mouth is twisted and she’s biting her own tongue.

“Oh, fuck,” Jo says.

Pat clicks the link.

 

“What the actual fuck is any of this, Josephine?” All that talk about how skilled Pat’s become at regulating her temper over the years, that flies out the window like so much bullshit. “You have a problem with us, with Pete, with private band issues, and the first I hear about it is _in a published fucking interview?_ ”

Jo is pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the coffeeshop. Pat is yelling so loud people are crossing the street to avoid them. There’re some great soundbytes available for reporters _now_ , should there be any skulking about, and Pat does not care.

“First, no one ever prints what I say, so I didn’t think—” Jo starts.

“Damn right you didn’t think!” Pat hollers, exactly like someone’s mom.

“ _Second,_ if that’s the first you’ve heard of it, no wonder I feel so fucking ignored! It’s not a secret that I’ve felt pushed out of this band since our first big radio single. The story’s been you and Pete this whole time. Me and Andy, we don’t even exist! No one cares about us, no one asks about us, and even when we do speak, no one can hear us over Pete fucking Wentz.”

“Stop, just stop,” Pat says. “I just read this all in fucking NME, I don’t need the live show too.”

“Well, too bad! You’re going to fucking hear me, since your ears have been too muffled by Pete’s _thighs_ —”

“I’d point out this is ugly shit to yell on the fucking street, but you obviously don’t care about privacy—”

“You’re the one!” Jo yells, her voice breaking at its highest note. She locks up in quivering, white-nostril rage. “You are the one being indiscreet. Not. Me. It was starting to get better, and then you two crawled back into bed together, and—and I don’t want to do the band anymore, Pat.”

All of the wind of righteous anger drops out of Pat at once. She and Jo stand squared off on the sidewalk, all their shit still spread out inside, patrons of the coffee shop and Chicago pedestrians staring at them absolutely come apart.

“You didn’t tell me,” Pat says after a long moment. “I didn’t know you were feeling so bad.”

Jo scuffs her ubiquitous Doc Marten on the sidewalk, scowling. “Well,” she mumbles. She shrugs her shoulders.

Pat feels like her bones are caving in. She has built her entire self out of this band. Her whole life, her whole future, her sense of herself as an adult, as part of the world: it’s all built out of Fall Out Boy. Out of the home this girl dreamed into reality and gave her, giftwrapped with the promise to world domination. Out of the home they built together on the road, in the space between songs in sweaty dive bar sets, on late cranky nights in motel rooms that couldn’t pass a pregnancy test—all the places they discovered each other, discovered themselves. Four records of it, four powerful truths about who they are and where they’ve been, the essence of their relationship to each other and the rest of the world distilled into song and captured forever in crystal. This is who Pat is. This is who Pat’s always been. This is the only thing Pat has ever wanted to become.

Pat says, “I hate that I made you feel so unimportant it was easier to say this shit to a—to a reporter than to me.”

Jo pulls the sleeves of her motorcycle jacket down over her hands, looking smaller than Pat has ever seen her, and starts to cry. “I hate it too,” she says, and Pat’s not mad anymore. Pat is an angry girl with the gift of forgiveness: when she does forgive, it is total, a full saltwater rinse of her heart. Her anger is magma, hot and lethal, but turns quickly into lava stone: death with the malice taken out. A permanent but peaceful alteration of topography.

So her anger towards Jo, her hurt about the interview, sweeps out of her. It costs Pat nothing to let this pain go. Perfect compassion and love for her friend fills her heart in its place. By the time she closes the distance between herself and Jo—and when, when did there start being any distance?—Pat is crying too.

She holds her friend, and together they mourn the hurts they’ve done one another, filling in with tears the damage they don’t know how to heal.

*

November, New York, the day after Folie’s release. They’re all in town for the Fuse release party, live and televised, and Andy figured they’d take tonight to celebrate together. They don’t know if it’s a success yet, but they’ve put something true out into the world, the last true thing they’ll make together. An era is ending, a lifeline. Andy wants to order pizza to their hotel room and make ginger ale toasts and sneak into the hot tub after hours with their friends, the same way they’ve ever celebrated anything.

No prize for guessing _that’s_ not happening.

Instead, Pete and Ash and Pat and the baby are having some kind of complicated domestic night in at the hotel, and honestly it sounds like a _Saw_ sequel, so Andy asks Jo if she wants to grab dinner. Jo says _fuck yes_ and Andy doesn’t think any more of it than that, until Jo shows up in her black leather motorcycle jacket and a maroon velvet dress.

It’s not _necessarily_ a date outfit, but fuck, Jo looks stunning. Her hair is gathered at the back of her neck with a clip and she’s got dark eye makeup on. She’s wearing the same scuffed-up combat boots she wears every day, but it’s to a totally different effect with her pale, muscular calves sticking out of them. The dress is snug, hugging her legs mid-thigh, with a scooped neckline that shows her collarbone and throat to great advantage. There’s a cleavage situation, and Andy makes a point of never ogling their friends, really, but—fuck.

Jo does this little dance at Andy’s door, shimmying her shoulders and showing off the glory of  velour or whatever, and Andy’s breath sticks in their throat. “I’m fucking starving,” Jo says, and her mouth is red like blood with lipstick, so her grinning teeth flash brilliant, and Andy doesn’t know what the fuck they’re going to do.

They’ve seen Jo in her underwear or drowned-rat dripping in the shower a thousand times. They’ve smelled her feet and her farts and endured her hideous snoring for years. They’ve absorbed the worst of her temper, held her hair back at her drunkest and meanest, been at her side through success beyond what they ever imagined and shit beyond what they ever imagined too. They love her: of course they do.

Seeing her like this now, it unhinges some new thing in Andy’s chest.

Or—not new. A thing Andy has worked for years at un-noticing, un-knowing. A thing that, here at the end of their band, here at the end of the only life they’ve ever known, it doesn’t make sense not to name anymore.

So they say to Jo the kind of thing they’ve always said to Jo: “Dude, you look _hot_. I should’ve changed.”

And Jo says to Andy the kind of thing they’ve always said to Andy: “No way. I like you in t-shirts. Otherwise you’d be cuter than me, and we can’t have that.”

And she takes Andy’s arm in exactly the way she always has, and they go out to dinner in exactly the way they always have.

And it’s totally, completely different.

*

Pete watches from across the room: Ash bends his head over his daughter, who glows cozy and pink in Pat’s arms.

She never imagined herself here.

The day she survived to 27, their manager called Pat to ask where to send the champagne. They had a party that felt more like a vigil. Her mom held her and cried. Jo gave her the bracelet from her hospital stay all those years ago, said, _because you’ll never need another one, okay?_

Every day since then she’s been off-map. Pete has no idea what comes next. Her wedding ring is snug on her finger, still thicker than usual with postpartum weight, and the only two people she’s ever pledged her heart to curl around the only one who’s ever fully possessed it.

Ash looks up from the golden baby, catches Pete staring, and gives her a smile with sorrow in his eyes. He knows what’s coming, Pete thinks. She wishes he would tell her what it was.

 

After a dinner of room service, Ash gives Bronx a bath, and Pete offers her hand to Pat. Pat takes it, and Pete leads her out onto the balcony.

“Fucking cold out here,” Pat grouses, and it’s true, but it’s always been easier for Pete to be honest when she has an audience. Tonight the stars will have to do.

“This was good, right? Tonight was good?” Pete asks.

Pat, her arms wrapped around herself, nods. She looks puzzled. “Yeah, of course. I hate to say it, but it’s nice getting to know Ash. It’s probably because your baby gets me high on oxytocin, but he seems… I like him more than I used to. We’re getting along.” She catches Pete’s eye and gets a wicked look on her face. Under an arched eyebrow, she adds, “Though it helps, what we did over the summer. He was a lot more annoying when I couldn’t remember the shape of your mouth.”

Pete remembers bruises in the shape of Pat’s mouth tracing up her inner thighs. She shivers, not from the temperature but from the way her heartbeat pirouettes into the memory of those burst-blood-vessel craters, the marks upon her this love left.

They haven’t touched since September. Since the hurried goodbye kiss in the airport. Since Pat and Pete asked each other to come home, and neither ever answered.

It would be the easiest thing to close the distance between them, to swallow up with a kiss the things she needs to say. “I want you to be part of our family, Pat,” she says instead. Her breath fogs the air, like the parts of her confession she can’t say in words are leaving her in water vapor. Like every exhalation holds the truth entire. “Like this, with me and Ash.”

“Like… you’re married to him and I change diapers? Like an au pair?”

“Not, not like an au pair.” Pete rolls her eyes at the deliberate obtuseness, but doesn’t snap about it. Pete feels cautious with her, with this new thing, and it is hard for a bull in an emotions shop to tread lightly, but somehow, somehow this is _working_. She doesn’t feel like she’s lost Pat anymore, not entirely. Pete doesn’t want to spook either of them. “Like a parent. Like a partner. Like a part of my life.”

Pat’s eyes are closed when she speaks. “I—I love Bronx like she’s my own. I do.  This summer was… I loved this summer. But I told you, I don’t want a life in the shadows, Pete. I don’t want to be your best-kept secret and your biggest mistake anymore.”

“You were never a mistake.” Pete knows better than to argue with Pat—ten times out of ten, it only escalates the situation—but there are certain things she can’t let go uncontested. This has always been one of them. The fundamental misunderstanding of Pete’s need for secrecy sunk them more than any other thing they were too young and famous and in love to figure out how to reconcile. She realizes with a jolt, here on a balcony in New York City, that if it’s going to be different this time, if she’s going to get not just a sweet summer but another shot at life, she can’t do it in the dark.

Pat’s eyes flash with temper. “Let’s not have this fucking fight tonight,” she says, her voice sour and tight. “We already know it by heart.”

“Can we have it tomorrow?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Doors are closing in slow-motion and Pete can’t stop them. Pete can’t tell Pat she’s different. She’s told Pat so many things, and she’s always been known for her misses, not her hits. She has to _show_ Pat she’s different.

So she walks back her declaration. She anchors her eyes on the stars, not one of which shines bright as Pat. If she can’t do this with words, she will find another way. She reaches out, pulls Pat up close to her side, and Pat allows it. Pete leans her head against Pat’s shoulder, Pat’s nautical sweater too thick to hear her heartbeat, and exhales truth.

For now, they are together. And it’s not enough. When she’s with Pat, Pete can’t even remember the word for _enough_.

*

It’s a night sharp like crystal, the sky ink-dark and the stars gleaming like they know every secret. The air is brittle with cold and their bodies press close for warmth. Jo’s nose is icy, and her fingers tingle from temperature or possibly possibility. She doesn’t have gloves, so when she reaches for Andy’s hand, she feels them: their fingerpads, the strong grip of their palm, the heat of their skin against her own. Jo squeezes Andy’s hand like she’ll grind it into dust and snort it to get high. She wants to crawl inside this moment, this madness.

It isn’t that it feels right. It feels like it already happened. Like she’s done it before. Like she knows this person and this path by heart, because she’s always walked it. Like they built something beautiful together lifetimes ago, and all they need to do now is step inside, and inhabit what is already waiting.

“I can’t believe how good dinner was,” Jo says, because it gives her a reason to bring her face close to Andy’s, to smell the fresh, clean soap-smell of them, to feel the warmth of Andy’s skin brushing up against Jo’s lips like the tide.

“I can’t believe you ate an entire burrata by yourself before our entrees even got there,” Andy says, raising their eyebrow pointedly. Jo is seized by the wild urge to smooth it under her thumb. There’s not a part of Andy she doesn’t want to map out with her hands and memorize.

Jo laughs, and runs her hip into Andy, bumping them off the edge of the sidewalk. “I will push you into the street, don’t think I won’t,” she threatens happily.

Andy’s thumb makes a curious, deliberate track around the back of Jo’s hand. They’ve held hands a thousand times, but never like this. They’ve done all of this a thousand times, but never meant it. Something about the way Andy’s looking at her makes Jo think they mean it.

“I’ll pull you down with me,” they say, but it’s not playful. Their voice is so sincere it is a wound.

Jo’s breath catches in her throat. She stops walking. She turns to face Andy, whose feet are on the curb, whose back is to the wintery New York street. She places her hands on Andy’s chest, above the scars, like she’s getting ready to shove. Maybe she is.

Jo holds Andy’s gaze, her eyes inquiring, and moves slowly under the street- and starlight. She wants Andy to have every chance to interrupt, to pull back, to say no. But Andy is still like marble, barely breathing, staring so deep into her. Jo’s mouth finds Andy’s with their eyes open. Jo’s whole body sings with the clarity of an awakened heart. Cold lips touch and there’s warmth within, and Jo’s eyes flutter shut without her permission, and she is lost to this. Her heart shudders, her blood thunders. Andy’s lips are gentle til they’re not. Andy’s strong arms come up around her and press Jo against their chest. They are solid in ways Jo is not. The size difference, the way Andy is thick and steady and Jo feels small in their arms—it feels exciting, it feels _right_. Jo kisses Andy harder, their lips parting, and Jo makes a sound she doesn’t mean to. Andy’s tongue is hot in her mouth, Andy’s grip is strong, Andy’s body is a hot hard line against the length of Jo, and Jo’s hand comes up to Andy’s jaw and Andy’s teeth scrape Jo’s lip and it’s a tiny burst of brilliant, startling pain, the kind that is a counterweight for pleasure, and it blooms through Jo’s whole body, and her heartbeat burnishes the surface of her skin bright, tight gold.

Andy spins away from Jo, stepping into the street, gasping “ _Fuck_.” Jo would think something is wrong but Andy’s grinning, they’re shaking their head, they’re smiling dazzled. Jo touches her own swollen lips, feels the ghost of Andy’s kiss, and shapes a grin of her own.

“Fuck,” she agrees. “That was—wow.”

Andy paces in the street, laughing, stealing glances at Jo. “I am in so much trouble,” they say, their voice tangled-up happiness and disbelief.

Jo’s not really thinking, just vibrating joy, words spilling excited from her tingling tongue, and without noticing she says something true: “You are going to fucking _wreck me_.”

Andy stuffs their hands in the pockets of their handsome wool peacoat. They rock back on their heels in the gold-orange streetlight glow, traffic whizzing past, standing in the street. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a disaster,” they say. “The chaos will calm us down.”

Jo catches her own lip in her teeth, stifling her too-big grin. “You read the lyrics I sent you. You’re quoting me back to myself.”

Andy’s bashful blush makes Jo’s heart speed. “Yeah. Such a Pete move. Is it cheesy or sexy?”

“Definitely both.” Jo’s heart is shining out of her chest at the thought of Andy taking it seriously, these songs she’s writing, this band she wants Andy to follow her to. “C’mere. I want to kiss you again.”

And they do. 


	14. don’t let me die with my hands in the air, don’t let me die when there’s nobody here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jo gets on the internet, Pete expands her horizons, Andy knows exactly what they want, and Pat has no idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love you guys. we're almost done, here. hold these girls tight in your hearts and i'll hold you here in mine.
> 
> My thanks to laudanumcafe and glitterandrocketfuel, who said things that changed how I thought of these characters, whose words I stole to make those ideas real.
> 
> [tunes](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

 

December in the suburbs. Pat’s skin itches with the imminence of Pete: she always comes home for the holidays. It will be the third Wentz family Christmas Pat misses, fourth if you count the one she spent touring Europe without Pete while Pete languished in her childhood bed. There used to be a stocking with Pat’s name on it. She wonders if there’s one that says _Ash_ now instead.

December and she can’t live in it, not when her brain keeps tugging her forward in time to January. She’s worried about two weeks of high-intensity touring, high-intensity Pete. She doesn’t want to fuck Pete. Of course she wants to fuck Pete. She can’t be heartbroken anymore, doesn’t know how to get more whole. There’s a hole in her the shape of Pete. She’s tired of trying to fill it.

“I don’t want to sleep with you in January. I need some space.” Pat practiced the words in her mirror half a hundred times, but her voice still shakes when she says them out loud.

“Babe, you’re two thousand miles away. That’s space. I’m closer to satellites than I am to you. And everybody wants to sleep with me.” Jo giggles, elbowing Pat in the side. They jog along the lakefront in air that’s way too cold to breathe, Lake Michigan freezing into slush beside them. “That’s exactly what she’ll say. I’m killing this.”

“Stop breaking character to celebrate your own realism,” Pat complains. Here’s the reality: her band ended without her input. They’re playing one last tour, crawling ‘cross the country under banners that lie _Believers Never Die_ , and then—then never means forever. Then it’s done. No one asked her if this was what she wanted. No one ever asks her what she wants.

Well, okay. When she says ‘no one,’ who she means is ‘Pete.’

“Okay, okay,” Jo grumbles. “Start again. Break my heart.”

Pat swats her friend’s shoulder. “Push you in the lake,” she mutters murderous. She takes a ragged breath—this sudden jaunt into fitness totally, completely, majorly sucks—and says, “I didn’t get the chance to process any of this. We were recording, we were fucking, you had a baby, you guys told me the band was ending. And I never stopped to think about what was good for me. I still don’t know what’s good for me. You hurt me so much the last time I loved you. You kept me a secret, you buried me in the dark, and… I have no reason to think this time would be any different.”

“There’s not going to be a band this time,” Jo puffs. “No stages, no spotlights. That makes it different.”

Pat shakes her head, jogging forward into the cold. “I don’t know. That’s the point. I need space to figure it out. And don’t you dare say anything lonely and romantic about satellites!”

“I don’t understand why you’re, like, breaking up with me when we don’t even have a romantic relationship.”

“Tell me with a straight face that what we have isn’t a romantic relationship. Tell me we don’t love each other. Tell me that when we go on tour in January we won’t end up right where we started, our bodies finding each other over the protests of our hearts. I can’t spend my whole life and pour my whole self out waiting for you to love me the way I need you to.”

“Oh, love. I’m not asking you to do that. No one is asking you to do that,” says Jo. She’s got real sorrow and concern on her face. Tears sting the corners of Pat’s eyes. This is because of the cold.

“Be Pete,” she demands. “Say what Pete would say.”

Jo takes a breath and says, “As a mature, responsible adult who cares about your emotional well-being, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I love you and I understand. I don’t want anything in your life that isn’t good for you. So you can have the whole universe if that’s the space you need. If you need more than that, I will personally harness you a black hole.”

Pat barks out a winded laugh. “Okay, now you’re breaking character just to fuck with me. She’s not gonna understand what I’m asking for.”

Jo nudges against her side and starts running faster. “Maybe she will,” she calls back. “She’s not who she was, Pat. None of us are.”

Pat speeds up. She has to: otherwise Jo will leave her behind.

*

January. Critically, the album is pretty well-received, but the fans start turning on them. Andy watches their bandmates react to this: Jo with spite and cannabis, Pat with the innocent disbelief of a Disney animal companion, Pete with grey acceptance. Andy learns new things about each of them by watching how they turn towards-and-away heartbreak. It’s not all of the fans—that knot of girlpeople at the core of their fanbase will always love them, the ones who are the reason they exist, the girls who found them and lifted them and made them—but their boyfriends have started to mock them for it. Their girlfriends with the shaved heads hear the orchestra and skip the song. The knot of hardcare loyalists who have always shown up in their oldest merch at every show start thinning out. The ones who come look bored or actually boo when the new songs. Andy doesn’t know if it’s the changing sound of the music as the band evolves or if it’s personal: if they’ve finally hit a terminal threshold of queerness, where Pat’s a public lesbian, Andy gets asked on a weekly basis _are you a boy or a girl_ , and Pete’s sexy, scandalous shitshow has settled into the shape of a post-pregnancy belly and a wedding band, and no one will tolerate them anymore. They’ve outgrown what they were allowed to do as ‘girls,’ the plaid skirts and studded belts and unpolished screaming, and now they’re making sounds only ‘musicians’ could get away with. No one’s indulging them anymore.

Andy learns things about their fans, about their bandmates, about their label, about themself. Pete’s arranged for them all to play dressed as zombie politicians for the limited winter support tour, these 13 shows across the coasts that will bridge their momentum til Bronx is a little older and they do a full summer tour. Instead of the sexualized costumes the label has been imagining for years, they take the stage more covered up than ever: full three-piece suits, vests and ties, full-face zombie makeup, and grey wigs. It’s some commentary on power and the political process, or just a final fuck-you to a label that is already sick enough of Pete’s antics. Andy, though: Andy brings all the full frontal nudity the label could ever have dreamed of. They take their suit jacket, tie, and shirt off a few songs into each performance. They’ve never had the option of playing shirtless before, and it feels fucking _amazing_. It is the closest thing to gender euphoria they’ve ever felt: scars, tattoos, and muscles out, their body streaking bulletproof with sweat and surety, glory and spotlights and the swirl of songs they crafted alongside the best humans they know. Andy belongs in their own skin, in their own soul, and onstage like this, they know it.

So Andy will follow Jo into any band she leads them to. Andy learns about themself: they will do anything not to give this up.

*

In February, Jo gets on the internet.

The sins of Fall Out Boy have ever been manifold. First and worst, they’re women; they’re women making popular music that is liked by girls. They’re women making popular music for girls who don’t pander to male fans or male gaze (well, at least by some interpretations that’s not what Pete’s doing), who don’t talk to male photographers or journalists, who hollow out room at the front of their shows where women can be safe, who get thrown out of their own venues for fighting rapey men. Women who are queer, women who turn out to be gender-expansive, mothers and sisters and daughters and wives, women who hold each other above all else. Women who would give up anything for each other. Women who don’t give a shit what a radio single is supposed to sound like. Women who write weird songs, intense songs, pop hooks with gut-punch lyrics. Women who stand up and shout back when they get hollered at.

The worst kind of women.

So the new record being celebrated by critics and slammed by fans, well, Jo’s not surprised. Of course she isn’t. It’s a Tuesday and people are talking shit about her: whatever. The music doesn’t even get shit on as much as you’d think, except when it’s a thin guise for the usual garden-variety misogyny. It’s mostly stuff about their personal lives, Pat’s weight, Pete’s sexual history, Andy’s transness. But this time, there’s more about the record than she thought. Shit like huge messageboard threads about walking out of concerts if songs off _Folie_ are played. Half-coherent diatribes ragging on their creative bankruptcy, more eloquent vitriol than Jo ever saw when they hit the commercial airwaves with _Infinity_ and people started discovering the words ‘sell out’ and ‘poser’ for the first time. Endless shit about Pete, about Pat, calling them all a _gaggle of talentless homos_ and _lesbians who can’t rock_ , which honestly Jo is considering for the name of her new band.

What Jo _is_ surprised by is how, layer after layer of the internet, beneath its mantle and down near the geothermic core, even on the band’s messageboard and in comments to her own journal entries, this is all she can find. Not just the internet, either: magazines, MTV, the fucking radio. It’s a shitstorm out there. She poured herself into the most ambitious creative project she’s ever been part of, she’s _proud_ of it—she was proud of it—and it’s universally agreed to be the equivalent of a hot shit on a soundboard. It seems like no one likes the album at all.

And it turns out she’s got something to say about it.

 

_February 13, 2009_

**Poison Dart Assholes (ouch)**

you know it was one thing when i was reading this shit on our messageboards but hearnig it on the radio is a real _fuck you_ moment, isn’t it?

i know what you think of me, what you’ve always thought of me. YOU SAY IT LOUD ENOUGH. fucking jewish girl from the suburbs, no-talent hack, unfuckable with a nose like that and can she even play? not as well as a dude. nice tits tho.

so poison dart frogs. not that i’m a herpetologist, but alot of you seem to be reptiles, so hear me out. some types of poison frogs are only poison cuz what they eat is poisonous. if they stopped eating poison, theyd just be normal frogs, and anyone could eat them without gettingill. and maybe people are like that.

maybe if you stopped filling yourselves with poison you wouldn’t feel like this, you wouldn’t be fucking toxic to everyting around you. maybe if you ate goodness and light and compassion and love, your hearts wouldn’t sink in saltwater and get all barnacled at the bottom of the lonely ocean for scubadivers to fnd. and maybe not. maybe the poison realyl is what you’re made of. maybe it realy is all you have to offer the world.

look at what you eat, is what i’m saying. what you’re breathing in, what’s in the drinking water, how much lead is the paint in the house you built for yourself to live inside of. we are too fucking old to still be so unkind.

but whatver, right? your heart is yours to carry. make it as heavy as you want.

\- Jo Trohman

Tags: jo is betta than yo…, jo trohman, i’m not so very young but not so very old, and i am fuckin sick of all this bitterness

Posted by theoneandonlyjotrohman on 02/13/2009 12:38 AM

*

March and Pete calls Andy in the middle of the night, crying like they’ve never heard. All these times they’ve allowed Pete to take care of them, and actually Andy can’t remember the last time _they_ put _Pete_ back together. Pete hurts herself with glitter and flashbulb explosions; Pete self-destructs with the aim of total annihilation by hurling herself at the closest warm body; Pete gets drunk and high and cruel and sloppy; Pete self-medicates to the brink of death just to hear the echo of her own screamed name ringing back from the abyss, ‘cause it’s better than feeling so alone. Pete doesn’t call in the middle of the night, sobbing too hard to properly speak, present and in pain and honest.

Or maybe it’s 2009 and Andy can’t say for sure what Pete does anymore. Maybe, when they weren’t looking, they all figured out how to grow up.

Pete’s making sounds like a wild animal, Andy’s laying in their bed in their house in Milwaukee, their head resting on a pillow that only just lost its scent of Jo, and their first thought is _someone’s dead_. So their voice is a jolt of panic and their head is full of hospitals and their heart’s in a rush and they say, “Pete? Are you safe? Are you hurt? What’s going on?”

And Pete’s voice is sodden silk as she hiccups out, “Tell me there’s a way through this where I don’t have to get divorced.”

Andy can immediately tell they need to be 3000% more awake for this conversation. They sit up, lean against the bare brick wall above their bed, and drag their hand through their short hair, trying to get their brain online. Marginally more alert, they ask the most intelligent question they can think of: “What?”

But Andy doesn’t need to say the right thing, because words are coming out of Pete with fire hydrant pressure; all they need to do is get out of the way. “I love him, Andy. He’s Bronx’s dad. I’m never not gonna love him. I don’t love him the way I love Pat, he’s not oxygen, but—he’s sunshine on a day that would be less bright without him. He adds something important and unique. He’s my _family_ , and sometimes I think I can love him in a healthier way than I can ever love her, because I _don’t_ need him. That’s honest, that keeps it true: it keeps us speaking our hearts to each other clearly, because we aren’t afraid to be different from one another, we aren’t afraid our love doesn’t work if we aren’t same-souled, if we aren’t heart-twins. He can just be a boy, I can just be a girl—oh god, am I even making sense? I sound like an Avril Lavigne song.”

Andy gives up on bed. They throw on a zip hoodie, open over their chest ‘cause they can do that now, even with the risk of running into roommates, and shuffle down the hall towards the kitchen. They smell coffee before they even hit the linoleum: Mixon’s up, and he’s brewing.

“You’re talking too fast for me to tell whether you’re making sense,” Andy informs her. Matt raises an eyebrow and they wave his concern away, filling a chipped ceramic mug with smoky, scald-smelling goodness. The oil sheen glistens rainbow on the surface of their drink and they sip gratefully. “Who’s talking about divorce, exactly?”

“I am,” Pete says, and her voice is tight with self-torment. “But An, it’s not what I want.”

“Okay, I have coffee now. Help me understand. What are the parameters of the situation?”

Pete laughs, a startled hyena bark. “No one ever talks about parameters but you,” they say with love in their voice. “Okay, the parameters are: I’m in love with Pat. She loves me too, but won’t be with me unless we’re public about it. I don’t know how to be with her and be Pete Wentz at the same time, so maybe with the band hiatus coming up we could… But I don’t want to get divorced. I want Ash in my life. He’s Bronx’s dad and I love him. And that is the part of the spiral where you came in.”

Andy needs so much more than coffee to cope with this. To buy time, they suggest something incredibly obvious. “Have you considered non-monogamy?”

Or they thought it was incredibly obvious. But maybe not, ‘cause it’s Pete turn to ask, “What?”

“Why can’t you be with both of them? Why can’t the whole mess of you all be a family together? I mean, have you asked?”

Andy actually hears the sound of Pete opening her mouth to shoot off some quick answer and then closing it again. It’s a sweet sound, truly.

“That’s so selfish,” Pete says at last. Her voice is so small, Andy can picture her: curled around herself somewhere, knees against chest and chin tucked over knees. Like if she can take up the smallest possible amount of physical space, suddenly the rest of her will become a manageable size too. But that’s not Pete, it’s never been: she’s too much. She always was, and she always will be. It’s just that not everyone is clever enough to realize that she’s too much _of a good thing_.

Lucky Andy knows it.

“You overflow with love, Pete. No one alive could handle being given all of it. That’s why you’ve overwhelmed everyone who’s ever loved you: it’s like trying to pour the Pacific Ocean into a shot glass. It’s impossible. All your love poured into one person drowns them, washes them away. You have too much love to give.”

“I honestly can’t tell if these are meant to be insults or just that weird, patent Hurley bullshit—”

Andy cuts her off because they know by heart how she lashes out when she’s confused. Andy is telling her the nicest thing she never knew about herself, and they won’t stop til Pete listens. “You want to give a piece of yourself to everyone in the world. You can want give yourself away until you run out, til there’s no more of you. The way you love is _phenomenal_ ; how much you feel and how freely you give it is the most beautiful thing about you. You are the least selfish person I know.”

“Am I impossible to love?” Pete asks. Andy can hear her crying, but it’s not the rending animal pain it was a few minutes ago. Andy hopes that’s a good sign.

“The opposite,” Andy says firmly. “And anybody who wants to lock your love in a cage, domesticate it—they’re the selfish one, okay? Loving you, Pete Wentz, is the easiest thing I have ever done. I have no idea how _not_ to.”

“Even with our band breaking up because of me? Even when you don’t want it to?”

Andy knows she wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t need to hear the answer. Pete doesn’t like herself enough to ask for empty reassurance, never has. She’s never expected anyone else to make her feel any better. She never even learned how to ask.

So what can Andy say? It’s true that they don’t want this band to end: their home, their family. But they understand that there is no more home and no more family without this step back. _Hiatus_. There is no happy ending, just a slow-motion slugfest that ends in total destruction. To keep loving these girls, to keep them in their life, to keep them all happy and healthy and whole, or as close to those things as they can get: Andy understands that something must be sacrificed in place of their friendship, if they’re going to survive the accumulation of the last few years. Andy would rather sacrifice the band, the thing they built together from dust and blisters and Taco Bell, from misogyny and snapped strings and giant roadside horseshoe crabs, than anything else. Because they _did_ build this band. That means they know how. That means they can do it again someday, if they want. As long as they hang on to each other.

“I love you in spite of it and because of it. In spite of and because every moment since we met. And you love me too. Right?”

“In spite and because of,” Pete says. She sniffles into the phone and then laughs, a softer sound than before. “Thanks, An. You always look at things in a way I never would have. I’ll love you til the end of time.”

“And then after.” Andy looks into the bottom of their empty mug and realizes they’ve shot any chance they had of getting an actual night’s sleep. “Hey, wanna watch a movie?”

“Can it be Batman?”

“Of course it can be Batman.”

And they spend a pretty nice night together, drifting off to the sounds of _The Dark Knight_ over the phone.

*

For Pete, February til May are golden months. Her baby learns to sit up without support, to roll on and off her belly. She learns to sleep through the night. Every screaming jag, every shit explosion, every scrape at Pete’s raw scabbed nipple: somehow she loves all of this. Pain used to the organizing principle of her life, the thing that focused her; now it’s Bronx. Pete has never been so in love before. Pete has never been so interested in being alive. Every day is full and wonder for her, for Ash, for this tiny human for whom she gets to curate the world. This perfect vessel for her love.

She doesn’t stay still long enough to gather moss. She stays in motion, stays in love.

Things are good with Jo again, since they agreed _Folie_ was their last record. They plan a summer tour together, the four of them hitting a rhythm of friendship Pete thought they’d left behind with Jo’s van. There’s tension leftover from the things Jo said in that interview, there’s tension every time a journalist zeroes in on Pete or Pat and doesn’t even ask Jo for comment—but it’s tension they can make jokes about, roll their eyes at, now that everyone knows it’s not forever. Jo even plays them a demo of what she’s been working on. She’s gonna be in a band with dudes, go back to her metal roots, take Andy with her. Pete is excited to see them play, to get the experience of being in the audience for that: it’s been years since she got to watch Jo from the outside. Her friend is a brilliant fist of a woman. Pete knows whatever she does will be fucking spectacular.

In April, Pat turns 25. Pete flies to Chicago under false pretenses and takes her out for a heart-shaped deep dish pizza and tells her, “I still want you to be my family. Move to Los Angeles. Raise my daughter with me.”

“And Ash?”

“Well—yeah. Our bed’s big enough for three.”

Cheese hanging down her chin, Pat snorts. It is so honest, so unself-conscious, so unpretty, that Pete fucking aches. “You know that declarations of mythic proportion don’t count as birthday presents,” Pat tells her. “You still have to get me something.”

“Uhh, excuse me,” says Pete, framing what’s left of the pizza with her hands. “ _Heart-shaped Lou Malnati’s_. This is the best gift you’ve ever gotten.”

Pat wipes her face with a napkin and Pete kind of mourns the sauce smear. It was endearing. “I’m gonna remember this moment, when I’m re-ranking my list of friends,” she says. “Your title of bestie is officially up for grabs.”

It’s a joke, they’re joking, but there’s a clench in Pete’s gut anyway. Titles is a conversation Pete doesn’t know how to have. _Pat, will you be my… everything?_ They haven’t had a physical relationship since Oakwood, and in December Pat asked for _space_ and Pete thought about paying to have a scientific telescope installed in her backyard, but they still talk on the phone everyday. When Pete’s in Chicago, they hang out in her old bedroom at her parents’, passing the baby back and forth. They watch movies with Pat’s cold toes burrowed into Pete’s back. They text each other _good morning_ and _< 3 <3 <3 _and _sweet dreams, peter pan_ , _sweet dreams, lost boy_. They’re together, except for the ways they’re not. It feels like thin ice. Pat said, _I need space_. Pete can’t tell if this counts as space. Pete doesn’t want to take too much. Pete wants to take it all.

Pete is acutely aware that she’s married and trying to stay that way. Andy taught her the words _relationship anarchy_ , but she hasn’t tried yet to say them out loud.

Pat empties her wine glass, her cheeks flushing in the way they do when she drinks, and Pete says something stupid. “I’d really like to kiss you.”

“Better not.”

“Why?”

Pat reaches across the table, picks up Pete’s wineglass, and takes a hearty gulp. The set of her jaw is an explicit challenge. “Wouldn’t want to do anything that might show up in print.”

Pete squeezes her own forehead. Hers is a heart that has never comprehended distance. Physical distance is almost as much bullshit as linear time, if you ask Pete. She wants to leap across this table, grab Pat’s jaw in her hands, and fill the rift between them with kisses.

Instead, she takes her glass back from Pat and finishes it, glaring. “Do you think it’s possible to be in love with more than one person at once?”

Pat’s face is doing something complex. “Can we not?” she asks.

“You said that last time. C’mon, Spitfire,” Pete pushes. “It’s not like you to step back from a fight.”

“Maybe I’m changing and growing. Maybe I retired from the ring. Maybe these days I don’t fight,” Pat says darkly. “ _Pan_.”

Pete sighs. “I do. Think it’s possible. Because I know how I feel about my husband, and I know how I feel about you, and… it’s not the same. These are feelings that don’t even exist on the same dimension. They come from entirely different places. They’re… you’re a chamber of my heart and he’s a valve on the other side. You’re both integral, essential, and you don’t feel the same at all. But I can’t function without both, not without grievous cost. And the way I’m happiest is when those parts work together, in unison… And I think we can all together have a life.”

Pat holds her scowl, narrowed eyes and thin mouth. Finally, the tension breaks and she huffs, her breath ruffling her bangs. “Fine. We’ll have the fucking conversation. But get me another glass of wine. No, the bottle. Get me the bottle.”

“Anything you want,” Pete tells her, meaning, _everything you want_. And she flags down their server, orders a bottle of red she can’t drink any more of without spiking her own breast milk, and spends a beautiful April night with the girl she loves, laughing and more or less avoiding landmines.


	15. open doors are open-ended

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the girls are good to go for something golden.
> 
>  
> 
> [cry to these one last time](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7N0uRVL9aYrzGM7yxjSSR4)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I knew I had to be emotionally prepared to write this story before I started it. _Sell Out Girl_ bounced through my head for a good six months before I put the first words down on the page, and it began kicking my ass immediately. I started writing it--I was ready to start writing it--because a relationship with someone I loved very much was falling apart, and I felt miserable and anxious every day with the particular, bitter desperation of endings... and I knew that was the right place to write this fic from. All the reading I did about motherhood, all the memoirs of women musicians, all the digging through print and video interviews from our boys during this era, all the time I spent ( & spend) with the Girl Out Boy crew in my head and out loud in the amazing friendships that have grown from this fic... None of that was enough preparation.
> 
> If I was going to write this story and do it justice, the heartbreak had to be real.
> 
> Well. As you know, my lovely readers, the heartbreak ended up realer than I meant it. I had my heart all the way broken, and I spun out. You were there for me. You were so understanding, so supportive, so kind--you cheerled in comments, you were sweethearts on tumblr, you reached out to me again and again to lift me up. To lend me your light. To give me the strength to keep writing this brutal, terrible story that tore us open over and over and over again.
> 
> It tore me open too.
> 
> But we did it, my loves. Because of you, we made it to this place where the most painful point of FOB's history is transformed: to the place where hiatus is made of gold, because although it is an agony of an ending, it is what was needed. Just as the love that I lost was a loss that, ultimately, I needed.
> 
> Thank you for hurting with me. Thank you for healing with me. Thank you for reading, for lifting me up, for letting these girls be part of your lives. For letting me.
> 
> I love each of you. This universe is the most important thing I've ever worked on. It is the single most important art I have ever been part of. Sharing it with you is, has been, will always be life-changing.
> 
> Girl Out Boy will return. I couldn't stay away if I tried.
> 
> all my love,  
> k

    

 

Every summer of her life has felt like this, since she met these girls. Since they formed this band.

Next summer will feel different. It will probably hurt. But somehow, Jo has found a way to be at peace with that.

“The All-American Rejects have a nicer bus than us,” Jo announces, stepping into the feeble air conditioning of the bus. Andy and Pat don’t even look up from the Gamecube, so Jo goes ahead and pulls her fishnet-and-cuffed-shorts wedgie out of her ass. July in the Midwest is sweaty as fuck: underwear creep is a real problem.

“Does their AC work?” Andy grunts, eyes fixed on their game. “It’s the temperature of a Kraft single in here.”

“Left out on the counter to sweat,” Pat agrees vaguely.

Jo huffs over to the temperature control on the wall. It’s set to 68, but Andy’s right: the air feels like the inside of a processed cheese. On AAR’s bus, it’s cool enough the beer doesn’t condensate. Also they have cold beer, whereas all Jo has found on her bus is a sticky, half-empty bottle of Pucker that rolled out from under one of the bunks. She grumbles, “I don’t know _who_ Tyra is fucking, but I think we should consider it.”

Pete struts into the lounge with a towel wrapped around her head, wearing only boxer shorts. Her tits and tattoos are out for all to see, but they’re all so used to each others’ nudity after nearly a decade of friendship (especially Pete’s nudity) that it’s utterly unremarkable. Well—to _most of them_ it’s utterly unremarkable. To Pat it’s Christmas morning every time she lays eyes on those same old titties. Jo has never made that face in her whole lifetime of Hanukkahs.

Pete shakes her hair out like a wet dog, her emo cut outgrown to an impossible shag. The residual plump of her belly folds softly as she bends over, scruffing her hands through the thick jet-black mop. “I think I need a symbolic haircut,” she announces. “Smear my face with ash, black my eyes and shave my head. The end of an era, the end of Pete Wentz.”

“That’s the most dramatic thing you’ve ever said,” says Jo.

“Uh, this morning, maybe,” says Pat.

“Let’s do it on stage,” says Andy.

Pete cackles joyfully, points a chipped black fingernail at Andy in triumph. “Yes! At our last show. Andy sees me. Get on our _level_ , guys.”

“Hey, An?” Jo asks. “Can I talk to you real quick in the back room? I had a thought about the transition from Disloyal Order to Hum Hallelujah…”

Pete and Pat both immediately burst into schoolyard _oooooooh_ s. “Secret lovers’ rendezvous in the back rooooom,” Pat sing-songs.

Jo flips her off as Andy sets down their controller and peels their bare thighs off the sweaty pleather couch. “Just because all _you_ can think about is sex, Desert Queen of Dry Spells, doesn’t mean the rest of us are sneaking off to fuck one hundred percent of the time.”

“I could be having sex every night for all you know,” Pat mutters darkly.

“But you’re not!” Jo calls back over her shoulder before she disappears into the back room. Andy’s behind her; as soon as they pull the door shut behind them, Jo’s pressing them against it, running her hands along their jaw and hovering just out of reach of their lips. She licks her own, her whole body a thrumming chord of ache.

“I do wanna fuck though,” she whispers against Andy’s carotid. Andy laughs, a low rich sound that spreads like honey through Jo’s belly.

“Thank god,” they murmur. The vibration of their voice is enough to make Jo shiver. “You’re all I think about.” And their lips catch Jo’s, and the rest of the world is eclipsed by their kiss.

*

Pete’s moment comes before she’s ready for it.

She wants it to be _right_. She wants to _know for sure_. She wants it to be the way it was the first time. Pat’s cold feet pressed against her legs in Andy’s dorm room, Pat asking if Pete loved her, Pete losing her entire mind inside of their very first kiss. She wants to be kids again, quivering bundles of nerve endings, gravity giving out as they’re swept off their feet.

She wants to kiss with a clear canvas and a clear conscience. But maybe things were never that way for her and Pat. Maybe she’s remembering it like a fairy tale when really, it was more like life.

So they’re onstage, playing a show in a city that straddles the Midwestern edge of what can officially be called ‘the South,’ and this tour has been tight and roiling with tension. Andy’s arms land blows that thunder through the earth, and it bubbles up through Pete like magma. Together they make a rhythm section that builds an energy that wants to break. Pat stamps the ground like a cocksure unbroken stallion, the look and power and joyful rage of her mouth at the microphone filling Pete with a low-belly burning, with something bigger and stranger and stronger than need. No one’s in costume, no one’s stripping under stage lights: they’re just sweating through t-shirts on outdoor stages til Pete’s makeup runs, just like they used to. They’re really, truly, finally _themselves_. They’re Fall Out Boy again, for the last time. No one needs to like the new record, no one needs to like those songs. Pete knows they’re good ones. Pete has a legacy she’s learning to be proud of.

They’re onstage and the moment comes.

Pete knows, or gets near enough to knowing that she can’t wait anymore. In a break between songs, she lets her bass swing from its strap, cutting a line of sweat between her tits, and she cups her microphone close to her mouth. Words start pouring out before she has any idea what she’s gonna say.

“Hi, I’m Pete Wentz, you may have read about me on the internet.” She gets some cheers, some laughter, some nastiness. They own themselves, but whether this audience belongs to them is questionable. She doesn’t care. “We’re Fall Out Boy and this is our last tour!”

Pete unhooks her mic, tugs the cord to test her range, and starts moving towards Pat. Her friend takes a nervous stutter-step in the other direction. “You guys know a lot about my personal life,” she yells to the crowd. “So I figured, if I wanted to make a declaration, what better platform than screaming it out these big-ass speakers to an ampitheater full of my nearest and dearest fuckin’ strangers?”

Pete tends to go rogue at these things, to get caught up in romance and speechifying, but her friends can tell she’s doing something different this time. Jo is pacing, feeling her tension, and Pat is watching her carefully with an unconvincing stage smile pasted to her face. Andy is quite still, letting their sweat drip into their eyes like they don’t want to spook Pete by wiping their brow.

Pete says it. She just _says it_.

“Patricia Stump, I want to see us together.” She can’t hear the crowd anymore, can’t hear anything but her own desperate blood in her ears. Pat is all she can see. Pat’s eyes are wide, her lips parted like she’s just been kissed. “This isn’t a stage trick,” Pete goes on. “This isn’t parlor magic. Last September, you told me to come home, and I stayed in Los Angeles. But home is where the heart is, and you are mine.”

She stops a few steps from Pat. Any closer, they’ll get mic feedback. The shriek and scream and static would suit what she is feeling inside. Still, she stays. She holds back. She does not barrel ahead: she waits to see if Pat will meet her.

“What are you doing?” Pat asks, away from her mic. Her eyes are wide, dilated.

“I’m telling the truth in public, out loud,” Pete says. “I don’t care anymore who hears me.”

Her words reverberate through the ampitheater, rise up and join the heat of the glittering late-night summer air. For a long, long moment, she thinks Pat is going to leave her hanging. She doesn’t know how to walk back from this ledge: maybe they’ll just go into the next song, maybe Andy will bring down the heavens with their drumsticks and that will have to take the place of Pete’s no-longer-beating heart.

But then Pat closes the distance between them. Their guitars smack together, a distorted gurgle coming out of their amps. Pat puts her hands on either side of Pete’s face and pulls their foreheads to touch. “Okay,” she says into Pete’s mic. Pete can feel her tremble.

“Okay what?”

“Okay I’ll be your home. Okay I’ll hold your heart. Okay let’s be in love, and choose each other every fucking day. Okay let’s grow old or die young or live forever together.”

Pete drops her mic, not caring about the hideous sound it makes when it hits the stage, because she needs to fill her hands with Pat. She wraps her arms around her girl the best she can, with these fucking guitars tangling between them, and kisses Pat like it’s gonna break the spell and undo the last however many years of bullshit, like it’s gonna make them young again, like it’s the kiss that’s going to knit them together forever.

And maybe it’s the kiss that does.

*

With clothes on, with no pretending, an honest Pete kisses her without secrecy or shame. It is, Pat thinks, the first time this has ever happened.

She barely makes it through the rest of the show. Her heart is exploding, sure, but that’s nothing compared to what’s happening in her pussy.

Pete grins through every song, dancing and laughing, leaning out into the crowd and grabbing hands. She moves near Pat, shaking her hips, planting sloppy kisses on Pat’s cheek that make Pat quiver, shiver, _drip_. By the time they leave the stage to wait for the encore, Pat can barely stand. She’s dizzy from adrenaline and blurring in and out of time. The operative word is _throbbing_. She is made entirely of want. They stumble off the stage, Pete grabbing playful at her ass as they go, and as soon as they’re out of sight of the crowd, Pat’s on her, Pat’s kissing her like she’s trying to choke Pete with her tongue, Pat’s fingers are bruising into Pete’s hip with the strength of her grip, she’s tugging up Pete’s sweaty t-shirt with her other hand. “Whoa, Spitfire, hold on,” Pete protests, but Pat just twists her head away from the kiss to yell generally to the backstage crew, “Give us a minute alone, here!” Pat hears Jo laughing, hears Jo say, “You heard the lady. Clear out or you’re seeing Pete’s titties for the thousandth time.” Pat hears but doesn’t see, because her face is buried into Pete’s neck, she’s biting and nuzzling and sucking that sensitive skin for the way it makes Pete shudder against her. The room is clear or else it isn’t when Pat gets her hand down Pete’s jeans, when Pat gets her fingers rubbing against Pete’s clit, when Pat strokes and then spreads the warm wet folds of Pete’s cunt, when Pat presses her steel-callused fingertip inside her and Pete gasps, and with Pete’s breath against her ear, the whine where it catches in her throat, this is love, this is _true fucking love_ , this is—

The crowd is chanting. Not _Fall Out Boy_ , not _one more song_. They’re out there stomping and screaming the words Jo first taught them to yell years ago, words they’re chanting still. They’re out there yelling, _Girls to the front! Girls to the front!_

It is the very best kind of legacy.

Pat slips her finger deep into Pete, is ever so gratified by the way Pete squirms and bucks back against the feeling, and then murmurs grinning into Pete’s ear, “Time for the encore, Pan. Let’s go finish what we started.”

Pete catches her wrist, holds her in place while she rocks her hips against the deep, deep pressure Pat is providing inside her. Pete’s nails bite Pat’s skin and everything about this feels better than real, more perfect than perfection. “Promise?”

“Promise you anything.”

“Promise we’ll finish what we started.” Pete rocks against Pat’s trapped finger again. Her eyes, heavy with gold, open slow. She stares into Pat’s eyes, lips parted breathless, and says, “You and me. We’re gonna finish what we started. We’re gonna spend our lives together. No more fucking around.”

Pat turns her wrist, sweeping Pete’s interior, beyond fucking desperate to make this girl come in every way she can think of, then in ways that haven’t been invented yet. Pete groans, her eyelids fluttering, and Pat’s grin is toothy like a wolf’s. “I promise,” she says, her voice solemn even with that grin. She licks her lips, which makes Pete gulp.

“Okay,” Pete whispers, and lets her go. Pat draws her finger out slowly, making sure to swipe velvety wetness over Pete’s clit as she wiggles her hand back out of Pete’s tight jeans. Pat nudges Pete’s chin up with her nose and softly kisses the very softest, most vulnerable center of Pete’s throat. Pete’s wild heartbeat kisses back.

“Make yourselves decent,” Jo calls, and then this backstage hallway is full of crew again, and Pat’s finger glistens wet with promise and desire while she shrugs into her oldest guitar, the one she always uses for the encore. The eye contact between her and Pete is taut and burning. They’ll play two more songs, glowing fucked-open Pete will go out into the crowd, the show will end, the kids will go home—and then. After all of that, and always. Pete and Pat are going to have a hell of a fucking encore.

*

 Jo Trohman knows where she belongs.

Summer tour is her heart and her bones. She climbs lighting rigs and looks down at outdoor ampitheaters, the grass out there trampled from last night’s kids and eagerly anticipating whatever crowd Fall Out Boy can draw. She lays on towels in the parking lot, eating ice cream bars that melt onto her tanning tummy. She wears a bikini top and board shorts and bosses venue techs around. She gets sunburn on the bridge of her nose and loses her sunglasses in every other city. She orchestrates tour bus pranks, she cries during meet and greets, she lifts up other women and girls with every breath and every heartbeat. This is her element. The road is her calling. Playing shows is her home.

Girls to the front. Girls as their openers, their photographers; girls doing their make-up, girls interviewing them for local radio. Mentoring the younger girls in smaller bands, the ones Pete hand-picked to launch towards stardom. Using the fucking grit she picked up from a young adulthood spent on the road to empower the next generation of rock goddesses.

Jo’s back on the bus and back on the road, city to city, lighting up the whole country with her wildfire intention, her passion and her purpose. She can see her whole future spread out spinning before her, and it looks different than she imagined, but it still looks like world domination. She’s anchored by the places they’ve been, the things they’ve accomplished: platinum records, chart-topping singles, records women have never broken before. Playing across Europe and Japan, winning a VMA three years in a row, filming in Uganda to raise money for Invisible Children. Fighting patriarchy at every turn. Doing it with her girls at her back—her family. Being loved unconditionally for all her mistakes, all the people she’s been. Taking on the fucking world and winning. That’s all she knows how to do.

Jo doesn’t feel sad, looking ahead and looking back. She doesn’t feel grief. She feels the electric crackle of her own potential, and she feels excited. She feels ready to fight.

Life takes things from you. Growth cracks concrete sometimes, breaks what you took for granite. What you took for granted.

They lost the band. Fall Out Boy is dead; long live Fall Out Boy. But they didn’t lose each other. They didn’t lose their friendship or their love. And that’s okay, in Jo’s estimation. She still has her whole future. She can still have the whole world.

They’re going to punch their way out of creepy glass coffins and iron cages, slip teeth over tongues and bite off any lecherous corpsely kiss, take anyone who tries to save them and throw his ass off the tallest tower, disembowel him on the thorns meant to contain them. They’re rewriting this fairy tale. They’re owning it. They’re the fucking heroes of this one. Maybe this is the end, maybe they’ll rise again. But Jo’s pretty sure that either way, they are all going to live happily ever after.

*

Their last show is in Chicago.

It’s the first place they ever played, the first place they lived together, the place where they found each other, found the music, became the band that was their home for nearly a decade. Of course it’s where they play their last show.

Everyone’s family comes, even Andy’s, wherein _family_ means _Matt and their other roommates and the people who have chosen, and been chosen back, by Andy themself_ and not _unloving strangers linked together by genetic tyranny_. Every song should feel sad, nostalgic, because anything that is the last of its kind bears an inherent sorrow. But actually, Andy is having a wonderful time. They can’t stop smiling. Everything feels helium-light. Their laugh comes easy and edges on mad.

Jo and Pat face off, playing a medley of riffs and hooks from their oldest and least polished songs, competing to see who can be cleverest. Pat’s voice curls rich and bold and joyful, and Jo shouts back. Andy sets down their sticks and picks up the clippers. Pete, her eyes wreathed in a made-up mask of smoke-black shadow, kneels on the stage like a saint. Stroke by stroke, Andy shaves her head, leaving a quarter inch of black fuzz to darken her scalp and cast into bas-relief the elegant, previously unseen shape of her skull. They hug for a long time when the last strip of hair has fallen away.

“How do I look?” Pete asks them with a hangdog grin. Her eyes are more enormous than they’ve ever been, the shape of her jaw sharper than it looked before. She looks small and vulnerable with no hair around her face, but surprisingly unsoft. There’s a masculinity to her now, a leads-with-the-jaw determination and challenge to her shape. The smoky, smeary black eye makeup lays bare the ferocity she usually conceals with bright smiles and quick jokes.

“Like men will cross the street to avoid you,” Andy says approvingly, running their hands over the pleasing sharpness of Pete’s new stubble. “Like it’s gonna grow out into curls.”

Pete ducks her head, looking pleased. She scuffs her hands over her scalp like Andy did. She turns to the crowd, never quite able to forget her audience, and throws her arms wide as Christ. “How do I look?” she screams. The kids roar back. Andy wraps their arms around their middle, tears pricking at their eyes.

Pete looks like family. Pete looks like home.

Andy turns their back to the crowd, something they never get to do onstage, and looks at her friends, her girlpeople. Andy loves each of them in such an urgent, vital way. This is a last time that doesn’t feel like a last time, really. Fall Out Boy is a tiny world they built inside themself: it will never really end.

Jo and Pat are leaning together, each girl resting her head on the shoulder of the other, and playing in harmony instead of in battle now. The opening chords of Saturday spill out into the air, and the kids who came to see them play one last time begin to scream. Pete touches Andy’s shoulder, bringing them back to this moment, and wipes a tear off Andy’s face. “We match,” she says, holding the tear next to her own glittering-wet cheek.

Andy leans into Pete’s hand, pushes her in the direction of her bass. “Last song, last time,” they say. “Let’s not miss it.” And they pull their sticks out of the waistband of their athletic shorts, and they trot to the back of the stage, to the riser and their kit. They sit down on their stool and do what they’ve always done, the one thing that’s always come most naturally to them: they play.

*

Saturday.

The song that has closed every Fall Out Boy show for as long as you’ve been in Fall Out Boy.

Tonight you’re playing it for the last time.

Pat sings it, you all do. It’s familiar as your own breath, your own heartbeat. You sing along because you know the words. Your drumsticks are steady in hands that have been molded and remade around them. Your guitar hangs on you in the exact way it always has, the weight and shape so reliable it’s an extension of your own bones. Your world makes sense like this, on this stage, with these girls, these sounds pouring out of your hands and heart.

But you hear it in a different way, this time.

You hear all the ways the words used to be true, aren’t anymore. You hear the ways they’ll always be true. You hear yourself, you hear your friends, you hear your fans and your battles and what you learned to love your way through.

Your heart is open, and courageous, and crystal-clear.

You are good to go for something golden. You’re going fast, but this time, you know where you’re heading—and who you’re heading there with. You aren’t wasting thoughts on the past, or on the future, on the afterlife or your own personal graveyard of ghosts and grievous pain. You’re living, now.

You’re really living now.

 

_end_

 


End file.
